The Cuckoo's Child (21 page)

At the same time, I own up to a tingle of anticipation, excitement even. There was something fascinating about a being capable of such enduring, implacable enmity, something monstrous in its wholehearted rigidity, turning every cherished notion about motherhood on its head, trampling remorselessly on ideals of unconditional love and forgiveness, deaf to appeals and argument,
and able to make it stick
.

My grandmother loomed in my imagination. She was more than all the wicked stepmothers, all the mad, bad women of myth and history, more like a grotesque female Cronus, gobbling up children to preserve power and keep things the way they had always been. I couldn't wait to meet her.

Almost as if she'd heard my thoughts, Deirdre spoke.

“She's a holy terror, that's what Mum called her. Hateful old bitch, mad as a hatter, if you ask me.”

“Have you ever tried to make contact, tried to see her or anything, on your own?”

Deirdre frowned and looked puzzled.

“Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to see someone who doesn't even admit I exist? Why should I talk to somebody who'd hate me automatically?”

They were good questions. Why did I? Did I have some dumb idea that I was going to drop into her life and change the attitudes of a lifetime? Devastate her with my charm so that she saw the error of her ways and folded me into her arms, weeping for the lost years? Not likely.

But I might be able to force her to acknowledge me. Even a vituperative rejection would be a victory of sorts because you don't reject with such animosity things that don't matter to you, that have no significance. And I don't mind admitting to you, Stephen, that there was a competitive element, a sense of pitting myself against a powerful opponent, which carried with it all the strings of choosing such a confrontation. Whatever happened, I would have a new yardstick for measuring myself; whatever happened, there would be knowledge and finality in the outcome.

But you have to know where someone is to meet them.

“I suppose we can safely say she won't be at your mother's funeral?”

“Fat chance of that!”

“How about Uncle Magnus?”

It felt strange to say the name, but then it would have felt awkward to say “your uncle” too. There were hidden traps in these new relationships, if such they really were.

“I've invited him. Maybe he'll come, if She doesn't get her claws on the announcement first. I don't know.”

Her voice trailed off, and she fiddled with a crumpled tissue. Her face drooped even further. I knew what was coming.

“You couldn't come, could you?” she asked, resignation at my refusal already in her voice. “No, 'course not, silly of me.”

Refusal was no longer an option. Where do you most often encounter family members you rarely, if ever, see? Weddings and funerals, of course.

“Yes, I'll come. When and where?”

Deirdre brightened.

“You don't have to, really, but if you do, it's on Wednesday at 2:00
PM
. Just a memorial service, she told me she didn't want any big thing. Actually, she always said I should roll her up in a rug and put her out on the kerb for the dustmen when she fell off her perch. Here”—and she handed me a card from a funeral home—“this is where it'll be.”

“How far would Uncle Magnus have to travel if he came?”

“He probably won't,” she said, “it's a bit of a hassle for him. I think he'd have to go into London from Reading or Oxford and then come back out again to get here. And he'd have to get a bus from the village to the train.”

Not much help. The direct approach always works better.

“Where does he live?”

“Oh, of course, you wouldn't know, would you? Well, I've never been there myself, come to that. He lives in Berkshire, or is it Oxfordshire? A village called Sharrington, anyway.”

“And what does he do? Or has he retired?”

“Oh no, I don't think so. He's the head gardener at some big estate there, what's its name? Grandad did the same, and his dad before him, I think. I'll remember it in a minute.”

I was longing to suggest a name, but I didn't want to influence her recollection.

“Have you got your mother's birth certificate? Maybe it'll be on there. Don't they usually have the place where the parents live on them?”

Deirdre braced her hands on the protesting arms of her chair and heaved.

“You're right,” she said, “and I know just where to lay my hands on that. I've been sorting through a bit.”

She shuffled away, followed by several cats who roused themselves, jumped from their perches, and stretched langorously as soon as she moved. The tabby at my side yawned, giving me a closeup of his entire mouth and a blast of fish breath.

“Here it is!”

Deirdre was waving a sheet of paper in her hand.

“There,” her finger pointed. “It's all there.”

I looked down at the rectangle of pink paper. It was worn and the ink had faded to a soft grey. The paper was velvety and disintegrating along the folds, but the careful copperplate of the clerk was still perfectly clear. It told me that a female child had been born to Adam Goodman and his wife, Esther, on the seventeenth day of March 1919 in the parish of St. Luke, Sharrington, Berkshire. Adam Goodman's occupation was listed as Gardener, Hescot Park, Berks.

Confirmation punched the breath from my body in a noisy whoosh. Slowly, I reached for the tiny seed packet from the gas mask on the table in front of me and pointed to the faint pencil marks.

“‘Hescot' was one of my guesses,” I said. “Is it a big place, do you know?”

“I always got that impression from Mum. She used to tell me about the big house, and the kitchen garden with high walls and a fish pond, and the hothouse where they grew grapes and stuff like that. One of these big country mansions, you know. They lived on the estate, in a cottage. Still there, as far as I know.”

She peered inside the envelope.

“What's this? Seeds?”

I explained.

“Oh,” she said, “they'd have been able to grow something like that. I wonder why your mum was bringing them with her? My mum was always keen on her garden, but she never had a greenhouse. They wouldn't have been any use to her, would they?”

“You'll watch for anything that mentions her sister, won't you?”

And with that, and sundry pleasantries and renewed promises to come back for the funeral, I waded through the cats who were now milling about, hoping for food, and left.

The air outside struck cold and curiously tasteless despite its overlay of salt and seaweed, homogenized after the concentrated cat fug in the house, but it matched my rarified mood of elation. I turned into a brisk southwesterly and made my way to the station, full of certainty. Buses and trucks lumbered past in a pall of diesel, carving their way among miniature cars, much like dogs swimming in the company of frightened mice. People hurried by, preoccupied and glum, or dawdled past shop windows, taking up three times their share of space with the overstuffed plastic bags or small children dangling from their hands. Empty chip packets and styrofoam cups bowled along the gutters, and a dog lifted its leg against a streetlamp.

I sped along the street as if I were invisible, hugging my discoveries to myself, pitying these dreary-looking people for their ordinariness. I could have done anything at that moment; leaping tall buildings at a single bound would have been a breeze. I looked forward to astonishing the Wimbledon ladies with my cleverness, and while I waited for the train, I calculated the time difference with Canada and rehearsed how to tell Neil my news. Spontaneous as ever, you see.

But there's nothing like a long train journey alone for introspection. As soon as I stopped buzzing from the adrenalin, the doubts crept back like ferrets down a rabbit hole. You've had enough ups and downs in your life, Stephen, to know exactly how you swing helplessly from hope to despair. Suppose I'd got it all wrong? Stumbled, quite by chance, on some people who
seemed
to fit the bill and simply swallowed everything whole because it suited me to believe? I am quite capable of it. Look at the time I fought with Neil over the car keys.

I
knew
I'd given them to him after I'd been shopping. I recalled, in angry and vivid detail, how I'd gone down to the studio to hand them over so that he could catch the five o'clock ferry, and he'd just got to a ticklish bit in the painting and needed both hands, so he'd gestured at the table with his chin and told me to put them down there, which I'd done, feeling irritated because I had to move two mugs and their disgusting scummy contents, as well as an apple core, a plate with half a dried sandwich curling on it, and an unruly pile of pages from a dismembered
Vancouver Sun
before I could find a space to lay down the keyring without having it drop instantly out of sight.

I defended myself with conviction when he asked me about them at about four o'clock. I can see it now, I told him: a bare, clean tabletop with the keyring lying in the very centre of its shining surface. I felt no guilt whatsoever as he turned the studio fruitlessly upside down, then scrambled to find the spare key, last used months before and buried almost without trace in his sock drawer. I was so convinced I was right that my mind had completely erased the part where I'd put the key in my pocket to handle the garbage, and walked away with it, leaving behind a clean table and fulminating silently about the slovenliness of men.

When I felt it digging into my leg as I sat down to a coffee long after Neil had left, I gaped in disbelief, then laughed. But now, remembering the tricks my mind could play over such a little thing was sobering. What might it get up to with really serious things at stake?

Like searching for long-lost relatives, for example. Hadn't everything come much too easily? Why was I prepared to trust all the people I'd talked to so far? How could I think they would all have my interests at heart? Take Deirdre. A lonely, recently bereaved, half-dotty spinster surrounded by cats. And I parachute into her strange life with my romantic tale. Would she say what I wanted to hear just to keep me around? I only had her word for her mother's maiden name being the same as the one in the gas mask. Oh, there was the birth certificate, but I'd been fooled by one of those before. Why did she seem so determined to put me off contacting my grandmother? If she'd never seen her, as she said, how would she know what she was really like? Perhaps Sarah had been the dotty one, filling her mind with nonsense about big houses and gardens. Perhaps Uncle Magnus was a fabrication, no more part of a dynasty of gardeners than I was, simply invented to fill the gap in the life of a child whose father disappeared one day and never returned.

By the time I reached Wimbledon I had convinced myself I should be a lot more cautious. I was even considering cancelling my trip back to Brighton for the funeral, but the possibility of meeting a Magnus made me waver. Anyway, I was very subdued as I opened the front door and let myself in.

A glimmering shape greeted me with a soft meow. I bent to stroke Mao as he twined round my legs, then made for the stairs, intending to take myself quietly upstairs to my round room and go to bed. But the kitchen door flung open, and I heard Isobel's voice.

“I told you I heard the door!” she crowed. “Come in here a minute, dear, and see what we've got!”

The last thing I wanted was a post-mortem session with the three of them, but there was no refusing Isobel. She was urging me into the room, standing in the doorway beckoning urgently, and making little mews of excitement. As soon as I got near enough, she clutched my sleeve and pulled.

“Just look what Evelyn's found! We said she'd remember, didn't we?”

Miss Hoar was laying a large book on the kitchen table. With a flourish, like a magician whipping the covering off the magically empty box, she opened it. The paper was glossy, and the picture invisible in the glare from the light. I stepped forward to see better.

I was looking at a double-page photograph of an elegant house with an elaborate white dovecote on the lawn in front of it. Fantail pigeons, white and ruffled as folded napkins in a superior restaurant, strutted on the grass. I bent over the small print of the caption. “The Queen Anne mansion at Hescot Park, Berkshire,” it read. I turned over the book so that I could see the title. It was
The National Trust
.

“I knew that name rang a bell,” said Miss Hoar. “I just couldn't remember the context. Then Mildred mentioned the National Trust and I remembered this book. We always drop in at their properties if we're near one.”

“Yes,” said Miss Plover wistfully, “such gracious houses. We do our little bit to keep them alive.”

“Not that we've ever been to this one,” said Miss Hoar. “Like to, though. Pretty, isn't it?”

It was. I stared at the picture, willing it to give up its secrets. The building fitted my idea of eighteenth-century houses, graceful and well proportioned, sitting comfortably in its manicured surroundings, but I couldn't say it was familiar. Where had the feeling come from then, so insistent, that I would recognize what was offstage, so to speak? That if I could see behind the house or off to the left beyond the dovecote, or walk away from the house across the lawn into the foreground, I might know where I was?

“That's amazing,” I said. “I was talking to someone today who told me about this place. She said it's where her uncle works and where her mother lived as a child. It looks as if I really may have found some of my family.”

Their pleased cries drowned out my remaining skepticism, and my confidence returned as I related what had happened. They didn't seem to have any doubts at all.

“Obviously the next step is to contact the uncle,” said Miss Hoar. “If the grandmother is still alive, she'll be very old, and there seems to be something odd there. I'd say the uncle would be the best bet. If he's a gardener, he's bound to be all right.”