Bay of Secrets (18 page)

‘Where is Papa?’ Sister Julia had asked, as she always did.

Her mother’s gaze swivelled away from her. ‘You know he is busy, my daughter,’ she said.

‘He has work? You have food?’ Because she could not help but worry. Entering the sisterhood had relieved her family of the strain of providing for her – but there were still four of them remaining. She examined their faces. All three were thin, but not too undernourished.

‘We have enough,’ her mother reassured her. ‘You must not be anxious on our behalf.’

‘No indeed, sister,’ said Paloma, her eyes smiling at Sister Julia just as they always had.

‘And now, Matilde—’

‘I am to be married off.’ Matilde had looked sullen ever since they had arrived and now Sister Julia understood why.

‘To whom?’ she enquired.

‘To a man almost old enough to be my father,’ she replied glumly.

‘Matilde … ’

But Sister Julia caught the looks passing between the three of them and she understood how it was. It was the second sacrifice her family had been forced to make.

‘He is a good man. A wealthy man,’ said their mother.

‘You do not care for him?’ Sister Julia whispered to Matilde.

Her sister looked her straight in the eye and what she saw there made Sister Julia almost sink to her knees, to beg her mother not to allow it.

‘I cannot care for him,’ said Matilde.

‘Then—’

‘It has been agreed.’ Their mother’s voice was firm.

Sister Julia bowed her head. ‘And did Papa send a message for me?’ she asked.

There was a pause.

‘He thinks of you often,’ said Mama.

But he never comes.

Perhaps he could not bear it, Sister Julia thought. Perhaps he could not bear to see her in her nun’s weeds and witness what she had become.

*

Now, Sister Julia’s steps quickened as she passed the newspaper kiosks and shops. She did not allow her glance to linger on the shop windows; not for her were the clothes and bags and finery that were perhaps the world of other women.

Sister Julia thought again of Agnese Jurado. What was her world? What would happen to her and to her unborn child?

The church bell tolled. Sister Julia was glad to get back to the convent; to the safety and serenity of Santa Ana. She rang the bell and a sister came to let her back inside the heavy gates, into the foyer which smelt of wax and of damp.

Immediately, she went to see the mother superior. She must share this with someone. She told her about the adoptions at the clinic and she told her about Agnese Jurado. She wanted to tell her more, explain that it felt so wrong. But …

‘You are confused, my child,’ the reverend mother said kindly. ‘Dr Lopez is simply protecting the innocent, which is God’s will.’

Sister Julia thought of Agnese and the rape. ‘But Agnese—’

The reverend mother raised a hand. ‘She has suffered,’ she agreed. ‘But we cannot now undo that suffering. No one can. The doctor is able, though, to help her unborn child.’

Put like that, Sister Julia could see that it all made sense. But the way Dr Lopez had spoken …

‘You misunderstood, my daughter,’ the reverend mother told her. ‘Your imagination is overactive and you must make it still. You are allowing yourself to be anxious about things which are not your concern. You must have faith and trust in the doctor. He knows what must be done for the greater good. He is a highly respected, highly educated pillar of our society. His way is the Right Way. God’s Way. He is to be obeyed without question. Do you hear me, child?’

‘Yes, Reverend Mother.’ Sister Julia bowed her head. Of course, she must have misunderstood. No doubt the doctor had been referring to some other girl, some other father. And even if he had not … He did what he did for the best of motives – she must not doubt it. He was trying to help the vulnerable, the innocent, the unborn.

‘You must surrender your will to God.’

‘Yes, Reverend Mother.’

‘You must continue to be a lamp of faith, of hope and of charity,’ she added. ‘Remain rooted in the heart of Christ.’

Sister Julia went to the chapel to kneel and pray. Of course this was so. She had questioned the doctor and the good work that he was doing. She had been weak but now she would ask for the strength to do better. She closed her eyes and let the quiet of the chapel sink into her soul. She imagined that she could hear a choir of angelic voices singing a psalm from the Bible. Their voices soothed her troubled spirit. Sister Julia heard in those voices the faint music of hope. And so she prayed.

My Father, my Father, help me to do your will. Show me the way
 …

Who am I
 …? For weeks now, this question had been at the edge of her mind. And at last Ruby was beginning to get some answers. At least she now knew the identity of her birth mother. Laura – the girl in the photos she’d found. Even then, when she’d first seen her face, she’d felt something, hadn’t she, though she’d tried to deny it.

And what of the parents who had brought her up and cared for her and let her believe she was theirs, really theirs? Well, they weren’t her parents at all. Ruby let this sink in. Felt the loss of them once again. She had lost something elusive. Her roots? Her anchor? She wasn’t sure. She just knew that suddenly she felt rudderless, as if everything she’d always believed had shifted away from under her.

She looked helplessly across the table at Frances.
What now?

‘I’m sorry, Ruby.’ Frances’s eyes were brimming with sympathy. But that didn’t help.

She tried to take stock. She sipped her wine, thought back to what Frances had told her so far. ‘So now I don’t know when I was born either.’ The people she’d thought were her parents never knew her date of birth and her birth mother couldn’t even remember …

‘Not the precise date, no.’ Frances reached out and patted her hand. ‘They did what they could, my dear.’

‘Yes.’ Ruby thought back to those childhood birthdays; the presents and the party games; her eighteenth coming-of-age party when she’d suddenly felt so different; as if magically metamorphosed into an adult. Older or younger, did it really make that much difference? Well, yes, actually. Everyone had a birthday. It was special. Why should she be any different? But it wasn’t her parents’ fault. Frances was probably right. They’d done what they could.

Still … It had all been a lie.

‘Why didn’t they ever tell me?’ she asked Frances. She heard the anger in her own voice. She didn’t want to hate them. But why hadn’t they ever trusted her with the truth?

‘Your mother wanted to.’ Frances ran her fingers along the stem of her wine glass but didn’t lift it to her lips to drink. ‘We often talked about it.’ She sighed. ‘She believed you had a right to know. But your father wasn’t so sure it would do any good. And he had a point. After everything that happened … Well, it just wasn’t that simple, my dear.’

Ruby shook her head. She didn’t believe that for a moment. How complicated could it be? Right now she was struggling. Trying not to resent them for keeping it from her, for taking control of her knowledge, for assuming a right to choose what she could know and what she couldn’t. For pretending. All those years. All that love.

‘Ruby … ’ Once again, Frances put a hand on hers and
this time she left it there. ‘Have you considered that perhaps Vivien left those things for you to find?’

Ruby stared at her. ‘You mean that was her way of letting me discover the truth?’

Frances nodded.

‘And Laura … ’

‘Laura was too young to take responsibility for you,’ Frances said. ‘She was just a girl.’

Ruby tried to imagine what it would be like having a baby to look after when you were just a girl. How would you cope? How had Laura coped? With no money, no job, just a VW camper van and some romantic ideal of freedom.

‘Not only that,’ Frances continued. ‘But she must have been traumatised by hearing of her mother’s death, when she had no idea poor Pearl was even ill.’

‘Of course.’ Ruby could empathise with that. She still had the nightmares.

‘To start off with, Vivien just wanted to help her,’ Frances said. ‘She felt sorry for her.’

Ruby nodded. She pulled the envelope of photos out of her bag. Picked out the one of Laura and the baby. The baby … The photographic history of her childhood was complete now, wasn’t it? This was her as a newborn. She handed it across the table to Frances.

Frances smiled. ‘That’s Laura,’ she said. ‘And that must be you.’

‘Yes.’ Ruby remembered the plectrum. ‘Did she play the guitar?’

‘I believe so.’

So had Ruby inherited her birth mother’s love of music? Was that why she had started playing the saxophone? Why she wanted to write songs? It was a weird feeling – discovering that genetically you were from an entirely different background, a different stock.

‘What was she like?’ Ruby whispered. She knew what Laura looked like, but she wanted to know more.

‘I hardly knew her, my dear,’ Frances said. ‘I can only tell you what Vivien told me.’

‘What did she say about her?’ Ruby asked. Though she could imagine.

‘She liked her. She felt sorry for her. But she also felt she was, well … ’

‘Irresponsible?’ Ruby guessed.

‘Perhaps.’ Frances handed the photo back to her.

Ruby ran a fingertip over the picture. Mother and daughter … When this photo was taken, Laura hadn’t known, had she? She hadn’t known that her mother had died. That she would be returning to England and that when she did – she would lose her baby too.
What had made Laura give her up?
Was it just because she was so young? Other young girls kept their babies, didn’t they? Especially when Pearl had died and Ruby was all that Laura had left …

Ruby sighed. The love beads were Laura’s. And the baby’s bonnet must have been her own.

‘Where do you think these pictures were taken?’ she asked
Frances, passing another photo over to her. Where exactly had she been born?

‘I don’t know, I’m afraid. I think Vivien said she’d been travelling in Spain somewhere.’

Ruby looked again at the golden beach, the turquoise sea, the wand of the lighthouse, pointing towards a cloudless blue sky. It looked idyllic. And yes, it could be Spain. Did that make her half Spanish? Who was her father? Would she ever be able to find out? She was part of other family units that she hadn’t even knew existed. Her father’s family – whoever they were – Laura’s family …

‘What happened to Laura?’ Ruby asked Frances. ‘Where is she now? Do you know?’ For one wild moment she imagined that perhaps Frances had kept in touch with her, that she could tell her Laura’s whereabouts. She imagined finding her, meeting her, being reunited with the mother she’d never even known she had.

‘I don’t know where she is now, my dear,’ Frances said kindly. ‘Vivien and Tom did try and trace her at one time, I believe. But,’ she shook her head, ‘she simply disappeared.’

‘I see.’ Ruby forced her shoulders to relax.
Simply disappeared.
‘So what happened exactly, after Laura turned up with me at Vivien’s house? Did she just hand me over?’ Like a sack of potatoes, she thought. ‘Was I adopted? Fostered? Or what?’

‘Not exactly adopted, no.’ Frances fiddled with her napkin.

Ruby sighed. No, she wasn’t adopted, was she, because
Vivien and Tom Rae were the parents named on her birth certificate. She looked across at Frances. ‘You’d better tell me the rest of the story,’ she said.

Dorset, April 1978

Vivien parked the car by the harbour, got out and retrieved the bucket of spring garden flowers from the floor of the passenger seat of her green Morris 1000. It was breezy, but the sun was just breaking through the clouds, boat masts clinking in the wind, the gulls shouting as they soared overhead, drawn to the harbour, no doubt, by the sweet scent of fish caught earlier that day.

Vivien locked the car and made her way across the rough concrete past the piles of warty crab pots and fishing nets laid out to dry. The water was sleek and rippling and the little harbour was full of boats – cabin cruisers and sailing dinghies, brightly coloured rowing boats and larger fishing vessels – all gently rocking on the water, though some, like
The Dusky Rose
tethered to the rusted mooring ring on the stone wall by the general stores, were somewhat the worse for wear. Not so much dusky as faded to a frazzle, she thought, surveying the peeling paint and rotting wood beneath.

Vivien’s favourite time here was winter, when the tourists left and the place snatched back its soul. But now it was
spring half-term so there were lots of people milling around – families eating ice cream or fish and chips, toffee apples or candy floss bought from one of the seaside kiosks lining the harbour. Others were going to the amusement arcade and the penny slot machines, or for a stroll along the front, and a few were tackling the windy cliff-side path up to Warren Down and the Beacon. On the quayside kids were collecting spider crabs in buckets, seagulls zooming down to steal the bait.

Vivien headed for the old chapel. A young couple were getting married there on Saturday – they were neighbours of Frances’s and didn’t have a bean to pay for a florist, so Frances had asked her to take over some spring flowers from the garden. Vivien always had lots of narcissi blooming – she’d cut loads and barely made a dent in the clusters around her garden path and in the front borders. Anyway, Vivien was happy to help out – they were a nice couple and in this village you did what you could to lend each other a hand.

The bucket was quite heavy although she hadn’t put too much water in it, and it swung gently in Vivien’s hand as she made her way towards the ginger beach and the old Wesleyan chapel, the water slopping from side to side and the small pale yellow heads of the narcissi nodding with the movement. The scent of the flowers – sweet and heady – drifted up to her as she walked, mingling with the seaside smells of the harbour and the sea.

Weddings and families … Vivien’s mind drifted. She stood for a moment at the pathway which wavered along uncertainly behind the pebbles of Chesil Beach. Beyond the
high rise of stones – the natural sea wall – the ocean was green and slinky, crusted with white foam, the waves whipping with the wind. She breathed in the fresh salty air. Vivien loved it here. It made her feel alive.