The Cuckoo's Child (15 page)

It occurred to me that the
A–Z
might throw some light on the fragmentary “-ark” name on the little envelope. A Park, maybe? I scoured the maps, and the index, patiently running my finger down hundreds of entries in tiny print until my head reeled, but I drew a blank. Whatever it was, it wasn't in London or its immediate environs.

I looked up stephanotis in the
Shorter Oxford
and learned that the name came from a Greek feminine adjective meaning “fit for a crown or wreath” and that it was any of several tropical twining shrubs characterized by fragrant waxy white flowers. Apart from the tongue dexterity I gained by saying “tropical twining shrubs,” this was unhelpful, as was the information that
S. floribunda
is also known as Madagascar jasmine. More to the point, the dictionary firmly pointed out that this was grown as a hothouse plant. Now that did introduce some interesting ideas.

The only hothouse I knew of in England was the huge glass and iron edifice at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. I had seen it only in pictures, but I knew it was an engineering marvel, rivalling the Crystal Palace, and the achievement of people who did not have to worry about money, who could afford to indulge their hankering for a tropical paradise of their very own, captive under glass, kept steamily perfect with its own system of boilers and heating ducts. While the hothouse at Kew was a giant specimen, even modest ones would be expensive to run. You would not find them in backyard gardens, and certainly not behind rows of two-up-two-downs in Bermondsey. But what about all those stately homes that peppered Britain? Wasn't that more likely? And mightn't whatever it was—ark or Park—be one of those? Perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree altogether, deducing a mountain out of a molehill, but it was a place to start looking.

Was I looking?

I was.

By the time I had squeezed this much from the three relics, I was hooked. I could tell myself as often as I liked that it didn't matter, I had to know. The frustration then was the difficulty in accessing more information from a place like Sechelt, with its nice little library and not much else. I could feel the information out there, waiting for me, but for how much longer? The people who'd been around in the war would be getting old, if they weren't dead already; how much longer would the memories I needed to tap be available to me?

Events were already ganging up on me, Stephen, but I think it was Neil who actually made my decision. The brief revival of interest in Daniel provoked by the tenth anniversary of his disappearance—the release of another of those aged photographs whose strangely alien, distant features made me weep and the usual flurry of sightings painstakingly followed up by Detective Mallory, who had finally contacted us once again with the dispiriting news that there was no news—had depressed both of us. I had been toying with waiting until the end of June and spending my summer holiday in England, but the months stretched before me, grey and interminably wet, the evergreens dripping, dripping, and I knew the delay would become unendurable.

Already I found it hard to concentrate on dissecting fetal pigs, and I was getting a reputation for absentmindedness, forgetting to read memos, forgetting appointments with parents, not completing or returning forms, all of which earned me reproachful looks from Ella and the kind of solicitous questions from Mr. Spalding that concealed a tiny Exacto knife of criticism.
Perhaps they'll be happy to give me a sabbatical. After all, I've worked plenty long enough to earn one.
Even as I had these thoughts, I had dismissed them.

But as I was hanging around Neil's studio one day after school, doing a little desultory tidying, I drifted to the window, where I stood playing with the cord of the blind and staring out at the sea. It looked sullen and fretful, slopping about among the rocks. I couldn't remember if the tide was coming in or going out, and the sea looked as indecisive as I felt.

“You know,” said Neil suddenly, “I think you should go to England and see what you can find out.”

How like him to cut straight to the point. I tried to do the same.

“You wouldn't mind?”

“Why should I mind? You're obviously never going to be satisfied until you've done all you can to find out. It'll be an itch forever. Scratch it, for God's sake!”

“When should I go then?”

“Sooner the better, if that's what it takes to get you out of my light and to stop fidgeting so I can work. Seriously, why don't you take a leave of absence from school, and go during the next semester? Leave at the beginning of February?”

It sounded so easy, put that way. But.

“I can't just go off and leave you alone,” I protested.

“Sure you can,” said Neil. He turned away from his work to face me squarely. “There's been enough hopelessness. Maybe
this
search will be successful. Don't you think that would make me happy too, to see you find what you're looking for?”

They won't let me go just like that, I told myself, as I wrote the letter requesting a leave of absence. But they did. Mysteriously, the board granted me leave without hesitation. Possibly it had something to do with the fact that my leave was unpaid, and they could save money on a less costly substitute for a semester. Whatever the reason, I was grateful.

Ella was thrilled.

“It's just like a novel,”she enthused, “or one of those mini-series. That is so
exciting
!”

Sheila was more pragmatic.

“What will you do if you find your family and they're not quite . . . what you expect?”

“You mean will I accept the throne right away or let the usurper stay on?”

“I think I mean more on the lines of what if your father's a mass murderer, or the whole family's spent more time in jail than out? What if they're people you don't like? The kind you'd never want to have anything to do with?”

Trust Sheila to put her finger on the sore spot and keep pressing.

“Well, none of us gets to choose our family, do we? Chances are good we won't like them all, even if we are related. That's not the point, really; I just want to know who they are and where I came from, that's all. I'm missing some vital information about myself that most people have at their fingertips. I just want the same.”

“They might not want to know
you
,” Sheila said sternly. “Thought about that?”

“Of course I have! I'm not going to force myself on them! I won't demand they put me on their Christmas card lists, for heaven's sake. Credit me with a little sense!”

Charles Grover looked up from his newspaper at the other side of the staff room, alerted by the raised voices. I subsided. Miss Penfold clasped her hands together.

“Well, I think it's very romantic,” she said, “just like the knights of the Round Table setting out on a quest, not knowing what they would find or even if they would succeed but going anyway.”

I rather suspected Miss Penfold of being a secret admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites and Lord Tennyson and did not quite see myself on a charger, tilting at hostile knights in black armour who wouldn't let me cross fords for no apparent reason apart from bloodymindedness, but I held my tongue, reluctant to spoil her vision. Sheila had no such compunction.

“Oh yes,” she said, “or one of those heroes, setting out on the journey full of trials with his tatty old sandals in his hand, ready to face the monster and save the world!”

The gas mask case and its trivial contents flashed across my mind, and I saw myself boarding the plane with them, heading for the unknown, a strange country, strange people, interrupting the story of their lives with the melodrama of my own. Did I have the right to do that? Was my wish to know the only right I needed to intrude and possibly throw their placid existence off course? But surely I was part of their story too. A missing part? A part they had got wrong all these years? Wouldn't they want to set the record straight too? My confidence in the enterprise was oozing away.

“I just want to know my own story,” I said lamely.

Ella was her usual practical self.

“And you probably will. Just don't be disappointed if it doesn't work out. There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then.”

“Yes,” Sheila added, “and don't forget to change the colour of the sails when you come back!”

So in February, I left for England, the gas mask case at the bottom of my carry-on bag. Neil saw me off at Vancouver Airport on a raw day, when the cloud ceiling pressed close to the sea and the mountains were invisible. The tops of taller buildings poked into the mist, and the air was full of droplets that clung to hair and eyelashes and ran hesitantly down chilled skin.

We stood together in that awkward space just before I walked through security and had to leave him behind. Neil's hands were jammed in the pockets of his pea jacket, his shoulders hunched about his ears. I looked at his familiar long head, the pale hair, tinged now with grey, like a scattering of wood ash, committing him to memory just as he was.

“I'd better go through,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He looked like a disconsolate heron. “Sooner you go, the sooner you come back, I guess.”

“I'll be back,” I insisted, kissing him. “Look after yourself. Don't forget to eat.”

“Right.”

I had to end this inane exchange. I turned away, bumping into another woman with a fat, swinging shoulder bag. The apologies got us both past the X-ray machine and the metal detector, and when I turned for a last wave, Neil had already gone. Then I felt miserable, leaving him with so much unsaid, all the fears and regrets hovering between the clichés. I knew he wondered who would be returning; I knew he had even admitted the sneaking anxiety that I wouldn't return, that I would find something over there that would hold me as fast as Calypso hung on to Odysseus, dimming my memories of him, and his claim on me, finally erasing them.

Just to say this could not happen was not enough, nor was it honest. The one reassurance I might have given, that Daniel was a tie that could never break, was the one thing I could not say. So I said nothing, and added my silence to the list of wounds I had inflicted on my husband.

I nearly gave up before I even started, you know.

I set out with such
resolve
, so much romantic claptrap about finding The Truth, finding
myself
(as if I weren't hiding in plain sight all the time). All fuelled by intense curiosity, of course, but less noble things too. Resentment. Anger, even. Those months between Thanksgiving and leaving weren't easy, were they? No matter how often all of you told me nothing was different, I couldn't—wouldn't—believe you, not really, deep down. I felt confused, so it seemed everyone must be lying. From the nicest of motives but still faking it. And I was furious that I could do nothing for you, Stephen, and that the fact that I could do nothing had been there all along while I sailed on, seeing myself as your saviour. A cosmic joke. I could hardly bear the thought of you searching out another donor while I had to be just a spectator, as useless to you as I was to Daniel.

So I set off with a fine head of steam, but it's amazing how fast it dissipated. You never consider how hard the little ordinary things are when you've left the familiar.

First my suitcase got rerouted to Glasgow. It caught up with me the next day, but only after I'd stood by the carousel at Heathrow and watched everybody else's bags whirl round without seeing mine. There I was, in a panic before I'd even left the airport!

Then I had to find myself a semi-permanent perch. I had booked a room in a small hotel near the British Museum, thinking that a week there would give me ample opportunity to find somewhere more reasonable. Two days were enough to induce despair. My hotel room, though adequate, was expensive. And cheerless. It was on the third floor, at the front of the building, so the noise of traffic filtered up day and night. The room was very small: a bed with the most unyielding mattress I've ever encountered took up most of the floor space and crowded a desk affair that supported a tiny television, a straight chair with chrome legs, and an armless chair upholstered in Regency stripes into an uneasy line under the window. The only way to circumnavigate the room was sideways, and I banged my leg on the corner of the bed by the door until I had a permanent bruise that didn't fade for weeks.

One look at the ads and a few calls and I was consumed with anxiety about finding a place to live that wouldn't bankrupt me before I even started looking for any long-lost relatives. Almost immediately, I twigged that there was no such thing as a cheap hotel in London, even when the exterior or the surroundings suggested that the owners couldn't possibly charge much with a straight face. My options took a downward slide. I found myself scouring the Rooms for Rent ads for Kings Cross and Brixton and Lambeth, checking stations farther and farther out on the branch lines, considering the
YWCA
and youth hostels. At night I would roll about the bed like a billiard ball, hearing the clamour from the street, wondering why I had come at all.

It was the chambermaid who rescued me. Her head, beaming like the Cheshire Cat's, popped round the door one morning. I was slumped on the bed trying to summon the energy for the day's search.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said, “I t'ought you'd be gone. I'll come back later.”

Her cheerful black face was already retreating. I didn't want the warm Jamaican accent to follow suit.

“No, come in!” I shouted. “If you can get in with me here,” I added as she edged round the door.

“We be all right long as you stay on the bed.”

“Kind of defeats the object, doesn't it?”

She smiled and gestured at the litter of classified sections surrounding me.

“You want me to take these out of your way?”