The Cuckoo's Child (13 page)

I considered giving them the drama they craved. I could seize the next lull in the conversation, I thought, and toss my question into the momentary silence.

“The doctor tells me I can't be your daughter,” I'd say. “How do you explain that?”

And it would roll there on the table, a little hand grenade without its pin coming to rest by the remains of the chocolate cake, while everyone gazed stupidly at this thing that would blow apart all pretence, before scrambling, too late, to defuse it with explanation and apology.

Or it might be a dud
, I thought.
There'll be a perfectly simple explanation, and everyone will laugh at my histrionics, and it will be the most awful anti-climax in the history of theatre.
I hesitated.

But it had not occurred to me that this performance we were giving might be a puppet show. The puppet master had other plans.

Mum was just stirring herself to ask who would like coffee or tea when Holly blurted out a question. Her voice was strained as if she were keeping tight rein on her desire to know the answer, passing it off as a casual interest, no more. Her fingers were twisting and untwisting her napkin, I noticed.

“Livvy, by the way, have you heard any results from the tests?”

I looked at Neil. He nodded faintly.

Centre stage. Spotlights full in my face. I swallowed.

“Yes,” I said and stopped. The others waited.

“Well?” said Holly. How appropriate, I thought, that it's the other outsider who's precipitating this.

I looked straight at you. Your face filled my vision as if there were no others in the room.

“I'm so sorry, I'm no match, not even borderline. I'm so sorry, I'm not any use to you.”

Holly's hand had gone to her mouth and her big blue eyes filled like pools.

“What will he do?” she quavered. Jason and Vanessa looked anxiously from face to face.

“Is my daddy going to die?” Vanessa's small voice wobbled too.

“No, stupid,” said Jason firmly. “If Aunty Livvy can't give Dad some of her marrow, I will, or you can, but you're a bit young for that, I expect.”

Vanessa subsided with this assurance and clung to Holly instead, two pretty faces equipped for perkiness creased instead with anxiety.

“There's a brave boy!” cried Mum approvingly. “But you won't have to do that, dear, it's obviously all a mistake. Aunty Livvy will make them do the tests again, and it'll all be all right, you'll see.”

Dad nodded and looked at me beseechingly.

But you were before me. “That's already been done, I bet,” you said, “hasn't it?”

It was my turn to nod.

“So that's it,” you said firmly. “We'll have to go another route. But I don't understand. Didn't you say you weren't even a borderline match? How's that possible? Wouldn't that mean . . . ?”

“Yes, it would.”

“But . . .”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Holly. “What
would
it mean? You can't guarantee a match, can you? Even with brothers and sisters?”

“No,” said Neil gently, and I suddenly realized he had taken my hand in his, “but there are always points of similarity between siblings. If there are none, it means they aren't related at all.”

“What do you mean? Livvy's Stephen's sister, isn't she?”

“That's how I feel,” I said, “that's how I'll always feel, but the biology gets in the way. Stephen is Mum and Dad's son, but with my blood group I can't possibly be their daughter.”

Mum had been silent for a time following all this, but now I became aware that she was rapidly coming to a boil. Her face was flushed and she was making flustered little movements with her hands, rapidly folding napkins and throwing them down again.

“That's a wicked thing to say!” she cried. “What do you mean by it? Of course you're our daughter! No doctor's got the right to say different, what can he know, silly fool, we'll get another one and you'll see, we'll make him eat his words. How dare anyone say such a thing! Fine thing when doctors tell you your own children don't belong to you! I'd like to see him tell me to my face! Who does he think he is? What does he think we are? Tell her, Bill!”

I turned to Dad, who was staring at the cake crumbs on his plate.

“How about it, Dad? Am I your daughter or not?”

He squirmed uncomfortably and would not look at me.

“Er, not exactly,” he mumbled finally. “
Technically
, I suppose, you could, you'd have to say, mmm,
not
.”

Rage made me cruel. I wanted to force him to say it all, to stop wriggling and come clean. The force of my intensity clamped his hands to the edge of the table and turned the knuckles white.

“So I'm adopted.”

He stroked his Crippen moustache.

“Ah, well, mmm,” he said cautiously. “You could say that. In a manner of speaking.”

“Bill?” whispered Mum. “What are you doing? What are you saying?”

And as we all stared at him, dumbfounded, the lights dimmed and surged twice, then went out altogether.

Dad escaped to the basement with a large flashlight and exhumed propane lamps and candles, handing up the emergency box packed with supplies for just such an occasion, including a tiny camping stove. Soon there was a wan, unstable glow from candles stuck on saucers, and the lamps hissed like infuriated snakes. Neil had been commissioned to fetch in more wood, even though there was still a pile on the hearth. It would have been a cozy family scene, everyone sitting round the fire, the red glow reflected on their faces, except that the abandoned table, strewn with plates and the lopsided remains of the cake, was a reminder of what had just gone before.

Neil came in with an armful of wood.

“Easy to see what's happened,” he said. “Have you looked outside?”

The children ran to the door; the rest of us merely looked inquiring.

“It's raining,” he said, “but the temperature must have dropped like a stone when it got dark. It's freezing out there, literally. The weight of this ice has probably brought some lines down, or a tree.”

Vanessa ran back in. “It's all shiny,” she said. “Jason fell on his butt on the driveway. And the trees have gone all bendy, like this,” and she demonstrated a graceful arc with her fingertips nearly brushing the floor.

“We're not going to try to drive back to Prince tonight, are we?” asked Holly anxiously.

There were murmurs of agreement, which ended with Holly bustling off with Mum to find bedding and places to put it for all the extra bodies, the two children nipping at their heels. In the sudden silence, Neil and you, Dad and I tried not to look at one another, none of us willing to poke the subject that lay quiet for now, but each knowing that someone would have to reach out a prodding foot eventually.

A log slumped in the fireplace, and a vein of resin exploded in a startling flare. You took the plunge.

“So,” you said, “there's more to the story, isn't there, Dad?”

Dad checked his moustache again.
The good doctor, scuppered by radio, met by police as he docks in New York, little Ethel on his arm, wonders if his luck has finally run out.
I watched his Adam's apple jerk convulsively between the stringy tendons of his throat.

“Well. Yes, I suppose so.”

There was a pause. You looked exasperated. I could have kissed you.

“Come on, Dad! You can't just leave it there! Don't you think you owe it to Livvy?”

Dad stared at his hands. Finally, he looked up, took a deep breath, and nodded.

“You've got to understand,” he said, “it was wartime. Everything was different then. You just did what you thought you had to, it was such chaos, specially in the Blitz, specially at night.”

For a second, the horror of those nights of bombardment peeped out in his voice.

“What I mean,” he continued urgently, “things happened, and people did things, I could tell you, that they'd never dream of normally. Sometimes they were good, and sometimes they were bad, I don't know how to explain it . . .”

“Nobody was playing by the usual rules, I guess,” offered Neil.

“That's it, exactly,” said Dad gratefully, looking directly at us for the first time. “It wasn't that there weren't any rules, there were rules coming out of our ears—I knew all about that because I was a warden, I had to enforce the blackout and make people go to the shelters, stuff like that—but you knew anything could happen, one minute things would be like they always were, and the next, who knew? Your whole life could be blown to kingdom come in the middle of the night. And you had to be prepared to act in that sort of mess, no time to think. It does things to you, that does.”

Holly slipped quietly in between you and Neil on the couch. I wanted to jolt Dad out of his preamble. I was now convinced he'd done something shameful.

“Okay,” I said, “so this was a time when anything was possible. So why not just tell us what happened, and what you did.”

“Yes. Well, we're talking about 1941, early on. I don't know if you remember where we lived in London, Livvy? Magdalen Road, it was, just off Tooley Street in Bermondsey. It wasn't much, but it was near London Bridge Station, so I could walk to work. Trouble was, it wasn't far from Tower Bridge and the docks neither, so we made a lovely target for all the bombers. You've no idea what that was like, night after night, huddling in the shelters, listening to the sirens and the bombs going off, bang, bang, bang, getting louder and louder as they dropped them in line, wondering if you'd catch the next one. People were brave, but they must have been affected. Half of us were barmy, probably, but everyone was the same so nobody noticed, I suppose. Nothing you could do about it, anyway.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mum standing in the doorway, but Dad went on, caught up now in the stream of his narrative, sustained by our attention, and she did not approach.

“Well, one day I come off shift and walked home as quick as I could. I should tell you, we had a baby, a little girl, we called her Olivia because she was born during a war, olive branches, peace, get it? She was a lovely little thing, about a year old then, but she'd always been delicate ever since she was born, and we always worried. I didn't like to leave your mum alone too long, but I had to. Anyway, it was dark, and I knew she'd be scared.

“I thought for a moment Mum had gone out. When I opened the front door, it was pitch-dark inside. I called out, and felt for the light, and when I switched it on, I got the shock of my life.

“There was Mum, sitting in her chair by the fireplace, holding the baby on her lap, all wrapped in blankets. She looked like a blooming parcel.

“‘What you doing in the dark?' I says, joking like, but I could see already it wasn't no joke. The baby didn't stir, and nor did Mum. In fact, she looked as if she'd been turned to stone. She was pale as pale, almost blue, like the milk we got in them days. Olivia's face, what I could see of it, was darker, lavender colour, not right. And when I took Mum's hand to stir her up a bit, she was cold, but not half as cold as the baby's face when I touched her cheek.

“‘Mavis,' I say and shake her arm. ‘What's the matter? What happened?'

“Her eyes sort of focus on me then, very slow, and she says, ‘I just can't get the baby to wake up for her lunch.'

“The baby's bath's still standing on the table, towels hanging over the chair. The water's stone cold.

“‘I've wrapped her up, but she doesn't get warm,' Mum says. ‘Should we take her to the hospital?'

“Guy's Hospital's just down the road, but I know Olivia's beyond any help from them. I haven't a clue what's actually happened. But there's your mum, acting very strange. I didn't know what would happen if I just up and told her the baby was dead. I didn't even know if she'd had any hand in it or if it was just an accident. I couldn't leave her alone like that and go for help, and we didn't have any truck with the neighbours. Going to the hospital seemed as good an idea as any.

“I'd just got Mum's coat on her, which wasn't easy because she wouldn't put the baby down, not for a minute, when the sirens go off. That sound! It just hits you in the pit of the stomach, that awful howl, sliding up and down, up and down, till you'd like to scream. I got us bundled into the shelter in the back—I think Mum would have gone out in the streets otherwise, I don't think it registered there was an air raid—and we huddle in there for what feels like hours, not saying a word, while the bombs fall.

“Well, the All Clear sounds at last, and we crawl out. It's still dark, of course, but the sky looks red in places, and you can hear the fire engines. Nobody takes any notice of us.

“We turn left out of our street and almost run down Bermondsey Street. Mum never liked going under the railway bridges even in daylight, and I have to admit, they were stinking dirty things, always dripping filthy water and pigeon muck, and you'd think they were coming down on your head when a train went over. So we run that bit, and then slow down to get our breath when we turn into St. Thomas Street. If we hadn't, I don't think we'd ever have heard it. There was a building up nearer the hospital that had been hit and was on fire, but nobody had got there yet, probably because it was a warehouse of some kind and all locked up for the night.

“Anyway, as we pass the end of Fenning Street, I hear a cry. Well, I had enough to worry about with Mum so strange and the baby and all, but I was a warden, I couldn't just walk away from the chance that someone needed help, injured maybe, but still alive, so I stop. Mum stops too, but I don't think anything registered, she was just stopping because I did, like a robot. Then I hear it again, and that time even Mum's head turns, because it sounds like a child sobbing, hopeless enough to break your heart. We never say a word, just turn down the street. There was a seed merchant's near the corner, big old barn of a place, with steps up to a covered porch and a great solid door.