The Adoption (3 page)

I take the envelope upstairs to my bedroom and sit on the end of our bed. I turn it slowly around and around in my hands, staring into my dressing-table mirror. In it a middle-aged woman, Lucilla Ryan, slim, with fine strawberry-blonde hair, an oval face, pale skin, delicate features, and guarded watery turquoise eyes, gazes back at me. She wears a pastel-blue cotton sweater. And there is a silk scarf patterned with tropical parrots tied at her throat. The loose knot is pinned with a brooch fashioned from a peacock feather, silver-framed under glass. This woman is suddenly a stranger. I don’t recognise her at all. I don’t
know
how long I sit here. I’ve fallen into one of those odd pockets where the treadmill of time seems to grind to a standstill.

‘Well, Cousin Frank has gone,’ Henry says. I look round and there he is, a reassuring comforting presence, as he has been throughout my bleakest days.

‘Did I behave?’ My tone is querulous. But my apprehension is reserved entirely for my husband and his pacifistic nature.

‘Well, you passed,’ he grants generously, coming to sit beside me on our bedside, the envelope sandwiched between us.

‘A merit?’ I push, biting my lip and leaning away from him, the better to assess his verdict.

He pauses and gives his shaggy-haired head a little shake. ‘Barely scraped through,’ comes his judgement. Another pause, then with his trademark frankness he adds, ‘You owe it to creative marking if I’m perfectly truthful.’

‘Oh!’ I sigh and then we both giggle. Merlin joins us, panting from the exertion of the stairs, and collapses at our feet, nosing our shoes experimentally. It seems Henry’s have the finest bouquet, and he rests his head on the worn leather of his loafers with a wine connoisseur’s appreciative wheeze. We both stare down at the envelope. Only Henry can absorb the emotions that are storming through me. He scrunches his lips together. The oddest expression but well known to me, as if his mouth, trimmed with beard and moustache, is frowning deeply, cognitively.

‘It isn’t sealed,’ he observes at last.

‘Mmm … so I see.’

‘Are you going to …’ His gruff voice breaks and he gulps a breath, then speaks again with more control. ‘
Fortes fortuna adiuvat
,’ Henry pronounces levelly. My husband is a gardener of philosophy, as opposed to a doctor. Learning the Latin names for plants was the branch that led to the trunk of Latin proverbs. And his ability to
memorise
them, reams of them, and supply them when symptoms of life require such sagacity is legendary.

‘Translation?’ I ask with trepidation.

‘Fortune favours the brave,’ my husband intones sonorously. Then he spoils it and grins.

Now I am smiling in spite of myself. Merlin shifts his head to Henry’s other foot. Through the window, out of the corner of my eye, I see the sun-kissed leaves all atremble. Spurred on by the ancient wisdom of Greece and Rome, I draw a breath and fish inside the envelope. I take out the photographs first, shuffle them through my hands. There aren’t very many of them, not when you consider that this is a lifetime’s worth. And, weirdly, none after I am about four and a half. As if, like Peter Pan, I didn’t grow up. They are all black and white. One. Aerial shot. I am lying in a pram with cuddly toy. The toy is an animal of indeterminate breed, the possible progeny of a lamb and a bear. The label says three months. ‘It’s an odd-looking beast.’ I glance quickly up at Henry but he is sober-faced, agreeing. ‘I mean the toy … not the baby. Not me,’ I say.

‘Oh no, not you. You’re beautiful,’ he whispers. I give him the snapshot and move on.

In the second I am a baby in my mother’s arms. I look solid, round-faced and plump-cheeked. I am certainly not being deprived of food. What of her?

‘She looks old, far too old to be the mother of that baby,’ I mumble. Henry nods. And that’s another curious detail. ‘Do you see the way she’s holding me?’ She is tipping me forwards, and craning her neck as if to examine me. She appears to be screwing up her eyes behind her glasses and squinting at me. Her expression is … doubtful. ‘What do you think is going through her mind?’ I ask and answer myself before Henry can, my voice tiny. ‘Is this really it? A baby? Nothing more to it?’ She was always a big woman, not fat but almost masculine in her
build
, domineering in her stance. In the photograph, she wears a patterned dress and a wool coat that has fallen open. We do not interlock. We might be images in separate photographs. ‘It says four months,’ I say, handing it to Henry.

In the third photograph, labelled five months, I am recumbent on a rug spread over grass. ‘My eyes are half open. As though … as though I’m dazed,’ I reflect. Henry looks perturbed and takes the photo from me before I drop it. In the next, six months, Mother is sitting on a bench, an arm strapping me in position on her lap. She wears a dark dress with a light collar. There is a little girl in a fussy smock, face shaded by the brim of a white bonnet beside us. ‘That’s my cousin Rachel,’ I identify, tapping the figure with a forefinger.

‘I guessed as much,’ says Henry, taking a closer look as I give it to him.

‘One year.’ I am peeping out from under a sun hat, holding a beach ball and staring in wonder at it. ‘It’s as if I’m carrying the world in my arms.’ I stand legs apart on a pebble beach. I keep hold of this one as I sift through the remainder. ‘Two years old.’

‘A nautical pose! You don’t look very happy,’ Henry remarks in perturbation, as though he would like to extract me from the photograph.

‘No! Mother and I in a boat.’ Instantly a wave of nausea grips me. ‘I’m not a good sailor even now.’

‘I know you’re not.’ Henry rubs my shoulder. He is such a kind man. There is a shortage of kindness in life, a dearth of it. But somehow Henry got the lion’s portion, which is liberally distributed throughout his character.

‘I look very distressed, don’t I?’ Henry nods. No argument from him. He knows my expressions. ‘My mother has on her long-suffering face.’ I sigh in remembrance.

I sift through the rest more quickly. Mother, looking less of a
mother
and more of a grandmother, bending down to drag me through shallow water. The sea? A lake? Me, sitting at the edge of a sandpit surveying a sandcastle I have built. Then an image of me by myself, and one of me with my mother in a park, both dated 1950 on the back. ‘I think these two must have been taken together. Look.’ Henry obliges, our shoulders nudging each other. ‘I’m wearing the same dress in each.’ I have a side parting in my shoulder-length hair. ‘It must be summer because all the trees are in full leaf.’

‘August I’d guess,’ Henry contributes with confidence, on safe ground with his expertise in all things that sprout from the earth. ‘Mmm … yes, early August. I’d put money on it.’

Mother wears a short-sleeved dress, belted at the waist. Her face is a long and angular, presided over by a large nose. Lines may be detected on her brow, despite the distance between us and the photographer. What strikes me about this mini album is that I am not saying ‘cheese’. ‘My lips look as if they’ve been sewn together,’ I remark recalling the frustration of stopped-up feelings. My eyes are haunted.

On to the next. I flip it over and read the date. ‘Easter 1952. I would have been four.’ I am in a dark coat and dark beret, clutching a doll. And I do mean clutching, with those same pensive eyes, anxious what-happens-next eyes. ‘And here’s one of me with my father.’ A business suit, hair clipped close, large glasses with chunky frames. He is swinging me between his legs. ‘I’m giggling.’ My note is one of wonder. ‘Proof that I could do it, that I could giggle if I had reason to.’ Finally, the last photograph. ‘Oh, Henry, it’s the picture I wanted. Me and the donkey. The donkey and me. I was in bliss on that donkey. I can remember those ears, those flippy-floppy ears. How soft they were.’

Henry clears his throat importantly. ‘If I might make an observation.’ Our eyes lock for a moment as I attempt to gauge what
he
is going to say. ‘You have a jolly good seat on a horse.’ We share a smile. Then I rummage once more in the envelope, lift out a letter and start to digest its significance. Seconds later and I am sobbing, Henry gathering me into his arms, Merlin displaced, up and whining fretfully.

Chapter 3

Bethan, 1943

IF I’M HONEST
when the war came it was sort of a relief. I was eleven years old. And really what I do remember most was a kind of charge of concentrated energy. It was as though electricity was running through my veins and not blood. It meant change, see, something different. There was lots of talk before it happened, know-it-alls saying this and that. Grave faces, raised voices. I can remember Dad losing his temper and thumping his fist down on more than one occasion. Didn’t really understand why at the time, but I do now. I was too young to take it all in, see.

Brice was in a flurry, too. You could see it in his eyes. They sparkled like the starry heavens on a clear night. He had gorgeous eyes my big brother, the fern green of the Preseli Mountains. And he was always so patient. Bethan,
cariad
, he would say, stop running about like a rat on a mound of grain. Round and round you go making yourself dizzy, getting nowhere fast. Sometimes he used to catch me up in his arms. And that was so nice. Though I was getting too big for those swinging hugs by the time he left. All that quiet, that inner calm drained out of him when the buzz of war began. He was seventeen at the time. The thought of leaving off books to help on the farm, well, it felt like freedom to me. Just the way joining up felt to him, I s’ppose. To hear him chatter you’d have thought he was going to win single-handed,
shoot
the German army dead all by himself, that it would be over in a month or so. Like I said, neither of us really knew what lay ahead.

Our dad frowned even more than usual. He said the country needed our farm to feed it, more now than ever before. I thought he was crazy when he spoke like that. Our little farm feeding all of Wales? It made me smile, and brought to mind of the story of Jesus feeding a few loaves and fishes to all those hundreds who’d come to listen to him preach. He managed it with a miracle. I realised soon enough that we’d need a miracle, as well, if we weren’t to expire with exhaustion. Our mam realised what it meant though, what was happening to us. She cried most every day.

‘Mam, why are you so sad?’ I asked her. ‘Everyone’s saying we’ll win and teach those beastly Germans a lesson.’ I won’t forget what she replied.

‘I expect we will, Bethan,
bach
. Eventually.’ And she wiped her wet eyes with the corner of her apron. She didn’t cry, though, when Brice came home in his smart uniform. I gasped he looked so handsome. But all the blood left her face and she had to be helped to a chair. She made a noise then that was a moan and a sigh all mixed up. She gripped his arms and looked into his shiny, shiny eyes. I don’t know what she saw there but it wasn’t good. She didn’t say anything but I heard her all the same.
Don’t go
, she begged with her eyes.
Don’t go, my Brice, my darling boy, my darling, darling boy
. And he grinned and bragged he’d be back on leave before she knew it, with lots of gory stories to make us girls scream. He was my roundabout, spinning me until I didn’t know up from down. Then he complained that I was getting too fat. I scowled at that. No girl wants to be told she’s filling out like a squashy cushion. He winked at my screwed-up face. He said that soldiers got extra rations of chocolate, and if I was good he’d bring back a whole trunk for me.

My mam, Seren Haverd, is as small as my dad’s tall. Her figure used
to
be rounded, what you’d call cuddly. And the lines on her face came from having a laugh. Her eyes are green like my brother’s … were, but richer, steadier, you know. She had a mischievous streak that in a blink could turn a sulk into a giggle. Before Brice left she had thick brown hair. Although she tidied it into a bun, it spent the days escaping, tumbling about her face like a waterfall. She threatened to chop it all off she said it was such nuisance. Then Brice joined up and that glorious mane seemed to go grey overnight, the lustre quite gone out of it, so that it lay limp and lifeless wherever she put it. The weight fell off her as well. Now when she enfolds you in her arms she’s all brittle bone. You feel you have to be careful because she may break.

The day Brice went to war he shook Dad’s hand and said he was sorry he wouldn’t be here to help on Bedwyr. Our farm, Bedwyr Farm, is named for Sir Bedivere. He was a knight of the Round Table, the fellow who returned the sword Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. It’s in Newport, South Wales. Our farmhouse is over a hundred years old, Dad says. That’s why it’s all higgledy-piggledy, with bits fallen down and bits stuck on. It’s white with a slate roof. There’s a small barn, a milking shed, a stable, a sty and a few old outbuildings that Dad is always promising to do up for lodgers. I’m afraid the way things are going it’ll be full of evacuees, not rent-paying lodgers. We keep sheep, a small herd of dairy cows, a few pigs, chickens and a couple of bad-tempered geese that I’d far prefer to see on a plate. We have forty acres laid to corn, wheat, barley, oats and turnips. And then there’s Mam’s vegetable garden, the mainstay of our meals.

When my brother surveyed the land he looked so worried that I flexed my arm and told him not to fret, as I’d be doing all the chores from here on. We all laughed at that. But I tell you, I wouldn’t have found it half so funny if I’d known how true it was going to be. He said goodbye to Mam upstairs in her bedroom, so I’ll never know what sentiments were exchanged. She didn’t come outside but I saw her
curtain
twitch. Instead of him arriving home on leave though we got a telegram. Mam read it out, and her face, which was all kind and gentle, set hard as a rock. That was the day she stopped smiling. It won’t ever leave me. It was 22 February 1941. I was suffering with one of those earaches I’m prone to. Mam’s troubled with them as well. A family weakness she says. There were reports on the radio that Swansea had been blitzed by German bombers, that the town was all but gone. They say you don’t value a thing until it’s taken away. So that was when I learned my mam’s smile was more precious than gold.