Eloise (16 page)
Authors: Judy Finnigan
‘Of course not. As soon as he found out that Ellie was pregnant, he disowned her. Said she would only be welcome back at Roseland once the child was settled and adopted far from home.’
‘So what did Juliana do?’
‘She talked to Jack’s parents. And they said that they would like to adopt the baby, and take it with them to Australia. Jack’s mother had been told she had secondary infertility. Inexplicable, but it happens. She was considering adoption anyway, and taking on her only son’s child as her own seemed like a gift from heaven.’
‘And that was OK with Jack?’
‘Jack was just a child, Chris. He was completely at sea, guilty that he’d made love to Eloise on such an impulse, terrified about the consequences. His mother assured him that the baby would be hers, not his. It would be formally adopted and he would have no responsibility for it. It would be his brother or sister, not his offspring.’
‘How did Eloise feel about all that?’
‘She didn’t know. She went through the pregnancy in Annie’s friend’s home in Plymouth. She was desperately unhappy. She wanted to keep the baby but she was thirteen, for God’s sake. And she knew her father was disgusted with her. He never came to see her in Plymouth, not once.’
It was late. Chris and I had started walking back up the hill
toward our cottage. We were both weary and glad to stop talking about Eloise, when our kids leapt out at us from the front lawn, where they were playing an argumentative game of football.
‘Mum,’ shouted Evie. ‘Guess what? Sam’s coming down tomorrow. He says he’ll be at Liskeard late tomorrow afternoon. He’ll call and tell you when the train arrives.’
That was good news. The way I felt at the moment, the happier I was to be surrounded by my family. They had become a thick warm buffer, surrounding me with a quilted blanket which protected me from the crushing cold of Eloise’s nightly visits.
Later that night, Chris and I fell exhausted into bed. We held each other tightly until we dozed off.
I dreamed a bulky object was pushing down into my stomach. It was firm and hard and gripped me so strongly that I couldn’t breathe. I tossed furiously against the invasive pressure. I moaned so much that Chris woke up.
‘Honey, what’s wrong?’ he mumbled, heavy with sleep.
But I was barely aware of him. I only knew that I was going under again, totally subservient to Eloise’s domination of my dreams. And of course I knew from Ellie’s diary what she had been through. I’d read her account of her baby’s birth. She wrote it when it was all over, and she, heart broken and bereft, was back home at Roseland.
Eloise’s Diary
I’ll never be happy again. The last time I laughed was last summer, when I was so in love with Jack. Now he’s gone to the other side of the world, and my darling little girl has gone with him. I’ve lost them both and I think I’m going mad. I’m back home now, in bed. I never want to get up again. I just lie here and cry. My body aches and bleeds. My heart aches and bleeds. I’ve lost the boy I love, the only boy I’ll ever love, and to lose my baby too breaks my heart. When I got home my father told me I would never see either of them again. He told me to forget them both; to thank God I’d been given a second chance to have a ‘normal’ life. Normal! My life’s ruined. He talked about the future, but without Jack and Isabella how can I have a future? My mother was gentler. She said when I’m older I can decide for myself if I want to see them again. I suppose that means when I’ve left school, when I’m eighteen. But that’s more than four years away. My baby won’t know me. And Jack will be twenty by then and he’ll have found someone else. I can’t bear to think of him in love with another girl. It’s April now and I’ve got to go back to school in September. They’ve told the other girls I’ve had glandular fever, which apparently is a good enough reason to miss a year of school and that means I’ll be a year behind so I won’t be able to leave until I’m nineteen.
Nineteen! That’s not for another five years. I’ll die before then, die of a broken heart, I know I will. Some of the girls sent me get-well cards, which was nice of them. But I don’t see how I can ever go back and pretend to be normal. I won’t ever be normal again. I’m not the same girl any more. Not the Eloise I was. I was just a child last summer. Now I’m a woman. I’ve been in love, had sex, had a baby. And I’ve lost everything, for ever. My father’s really ashamed of me. I’m ashamed of myself too. I did something wrong and now I’ve ruined my life.
I thought I’d never want to write about what happened at the hospital, but if I don’t I’m frightened I might forget, and I never want to forget my baby. My waters broke at the home Annie found for me in Plymouth with her friends. It was so weird. I just stood up and then whoosh I was soaking wet. It was all over the floor and they took me to hospital. My mother had paid for a private room and that was good, because I never stopped crying the whole time I was there. They phoned Mummy and she came immediately and stayed with me all the way through. She was wonderful. I was so scared, especially when the contractions started. They were a bit slow at first, so they gave me something to make them come more quickly. I don’t remember much of the labour; it was a nightmare. I’ve never felt pain like it before. Absolute spasms of agony. They gave me gas and air but it didn’t help much. I
thought it would never end and all I could think of was my mother. I held onto her like mad and it was only her love and reassurance that got me through.
But when it was over, when they put Isabella into my arms, for just a moment I felt wonderful. I felt such love for her, like nothing I’d ever felt before. And Mummy told me she loved me, and that my daughter was gorgeous and beautiful. But we both knew we couldn’t keep her. And Mummy sobbed nearly as much as me.
They came for her the next day, the baby’s new parents. I couldn’t bear it! I cried and cried and begged Mummy to let me keep Isabella. She had tears in her eyes, but she shook her head and took the baby from my arms. Somehow I managed to stop crying and got out of bed.
‘If my baby has to go, then I must be the one to give her to her new parents,’ I said.
The nurse who had come to tell us that Jack’s parents were here gave me a hug and said that she would get a wheelchair to take me to the room where Isabella’s new parents were waiting.
As she pushed me along the corridor, I held Isabella in my arms and told her over and over and over again how much I loved her, how much I didn’t want to give her away. And I told her that her new parents would love her, because I knew and liked them and was sure they would. And that her real daddy would be there to watch over her …
Jack’s mother’s
eyes were full of tears as she took Isabella from me, and his father told me how very happy and grateful to me they were. They wanted me to know that the baby was already as precious to them as Jack, who hadn’t come with them. I couldn’t feel anything; I just felt so empty.
I went home the next morning. My dad was stern and distant. My milk had started to come in, and that night as I sat in the bath it streamed down from my breasts into the bathwater. I cried and shook so much that Annie heard me and came in. She realised what was happening, and later, in my bedroom, she bound my breasts tight with a bandage. She said it would stop the milk. She was wonderful. I truly think that without her and Mummy, I would have died of grief.
I’d read the diary earlier at Juliana’s, and that night I dreamed vividly that I was Eloise, having her baby in that lonely little hospital room. I felt her pains, her labour; her joy as Isabella was born, her despair as she realised she could not keep her.
How can you deal with a loss like that? What do you feel like, your insides raw, your breasts aching for the small new life that has emerged from your body; your own; totally yours, flesh of your flesh? And yet this child has to be given to someone else. This is torture, surely. This is beyond endurance.
I woke with tears rolling down my cheeks.
Poor, poor Eloise.
When I got up, I couldn’t shake off a feeling of foreboding. I had to get out of the house, so I went to Polperro to pick up bread, milk and newspapers. Now I was on my way back. Walking along the familiar cliff path usually cleared my head, but today I just couldn’t get a grip on Juliana’s revelations.
Why was Arthur here, in Cornwall? Juliana had written to Jack in Australia after Eloise died, but Arthur had never even met my friend. Obviously he now knew Juliana was his great-grandmother, and that his grandmother was her dead daughter. But, even so, why had he come halfway across the
world to see the grave of a woman he had never known? And at sixteen, why had his parents let him travel so far alone? Had Eloise left him some money? Had her solicitor suggested she wanted him to come to Cornwall to meet Juliana? Amidst all the revelations of Eloise’s teenage pregnancy, I’d been too shocked to ask some of the more obvious questions. And then there was Eloise, or her ghost, still begging me night after night to do – what? Protect her children. But which children? Her twins, of course. But what about the baby girl she had when she was thirteen, who now had a teenage son of her own? Was Arthur included in those whom Ellie was so desperate to keep safe? And safe from what – or whom?
And I was so tired and isolated. I couldn’t stop the horrible anxiety in my head, and I knew Chris was getting increasingly fed up with me. And I relied on him, his solid good sense, so much. I accepted that my mind could be fragile, and I needed his strength, his support. And I loved him. But close as we’d been physically last night, I knew he was pulling away from me, exasperated, but also worried that my mental health was deteriorating again. And that gave him power over me, I realised. That was why he had felt justified in trying to drug me while he went out to meet Ted. A wave of fury swept over me as I remembered his betrayal – because that is what it was.
Polperro was busy. It’s such a pretty village, as enchanting as a film set, leading down to a gloriously beautiful working harbour. Clustered together are gorgeously picturesque white cottages, close-set, some of them built on stilts over the river that runs through the centre. Many of them are decorated with seashells, painstakingly gathered, and winking at you as you walk by. As a holiday destination, it’s idyllic, but its deeply shadowed position in the valley has a dark side. From late October to the end of February Polperro sees virtually no sun. My own edge of darkness echoed its winter gloom as I walked up the village’s enticing main street. Bright and lovely now, dark and forbidding for nearly half the year.
I shuddered. I was being silly. Polperro is enchanting, and I love it.
I bought some newspapers, and chocolate for the kids, and headed home. On the way back along the cliff path the heavens opened, and I cursed because I hadn’t brought a coat. Hurrying as fast as I could to get home, I saw a man ahead of me, his head bent against the driving rain. I knew immediately it was Ted. He’d reached the War Memorial, where he stopped. He hadn’t seen me yet, and I stopped too, glancing around me to see where I could hide. There was nowhere, of course. On one side the narrow path was bordered by a sheer rock face. On the other just a vertiginous drop down to the sea. I sighed. I didn’t want to talk to Ted,
but it looked as if I had no choice. Either that or wait here getting soaked until he chose to move on.
Reluctantly I walked on down the path. As I neared the Memorial I realised Ted was talking to himself. His blond hair was flattened by the rain, which streamed down his face. At first I thought he was crying, but then I saw that he was actually shouting, raging into the storm, like some mad King Lear. He looked crazy. I realised that if I didn’t know him I’d be very frightened. Madmen on a lonely cliff path are not a welcome sight. And there was no other soul to be seen.
Ted had revealed a side of himself to Chris and me that I had never suspected. The language he’d used about Eloise was vile, riddled with suppressed violence. And as I watched him now, I suddenly saw a potentially violent man, full of aggression and hate.
He’d seen me. He stopped his ranting and stared at me with such hatred that I flinched.
‘Hello, Ted,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘This weather’s foul, isn’t it?’
He laughed. ‘Do you really think I give a fuck about the weather? Suits my mood, anyway. I was looking for you. James at the café said you’d come up here.’
‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘Didn’t your shrink of a husband tell you? That our marriage was a lie?’
‘Yes, he did. But it’s over now. Come on, Ted. Think about the girls. Stop brooding and try to move on. They need you.’
‘Do you think so?’ he sneered. ‘Pity Eloise didn’t agree with you.’
‘What are you talking about? Of course she did.’
‘Oh, right. So that’s why she left me a bloody pittance in her will. The rest is all in trust for the girls. All I get is the house – and that’s only until the twins are twenty-one. After that it reverts to them. Oh, and she’s kindly left me a housekeeping allowance – a basic living wage to look after them. I get no capital at all. I’m no better off now than before … ’ He broke off. ‘But then you bloody knew that already, Cath. You and Eloise were always in cahoots.’