The Cuckoo's Child (26 page)

“Don't you worry yourself now,” he hastened to reassure me, “I believe you, and you should see your folks. But she's difficult, you know. I can't promise she'll agree to meet you. She's a pig-headed old besom when she gets an idea in her head, I'll tell you. But if I can fix it, I will. You'd better give me your address or phone number, and I'll be in touch one way or another.”

I can recognize a dismissal. I gave him the information and started to repack the gas mask case.

“Hang on a minute,” Magnus said as we left the greenhouse. “Wait here. I'll be right back.”

He crunched away across the gravel and disappeared through an archway in the wall. The sun was low, and there was little warmth in it, but the old bricks glowed in its last rays, and the air was quiet and soft. Into that stillness dropped a now familiar sound, the two liquid notes falling, one after the other, clear but not close, somewhere over the water trickling downhill in its mossy course, or over the tall trees of the heronry, or deep in the thickets behind the cow pastures.

“Listen,” I said as Magnus crunched back. “A cuckoo.”

“Ah,” he said, “they've been around a while.”

“Why do people get all excited about hearing one? Are they rare?”

“Not round here, they're not. Not that you ever
see
them, really. You just know they're around, and then they're gone.”

“Sounds like my father.”

Magnus looked at me sharply and rubbed his chin, a gesture I had come to realize meant he was weighing something up.

“‘Out of the mouths of babes,'” he said. “You know what cuckoos do, don't you?”

I didn't, but I was distracted by the small book he was holding.

“What's that?”

“It's what made me a believer,” he replied. “Look.”

He opened the book and I saw immediately it was an address book. He turned the last page of the Ls and held it so I could see. The letter M was missing, torn out with the last entry on the page. I rummaged in the gas mask case and brought out the scrap of paper with Sarah's address and laid it on the book. It fitted perfectly.

“Soon as I saw that, I knew,” said Magnus. “I ripped that out because Susanna needed it. She'd decided to take you and run off to London to stay with Sarah, but Mother would have stopped her. She would never have got hold of that book on her own.”

“So you were her accomplice!”

“Her executioner, more like,” said Magnus grimly. “She'd be alive still if I hadn't helped. I gave her all the money I had too. 'Tweren't much, just from odd jobs, but it must have bought her a ticket. And then look what it took her to. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, all right.”

What can you say to that kind of guilt? Useless to make the usual disclaimers—you can't blame yourself, it was an accident, you couldn't have known, you were little more than a child yourself. They were true, but not true. My uncle may have acted out of affection for his sister, but he would never be able to see that as mitigation. Magnus had carried the weight of responsibility for his sister's death all his life, just as I carried the guilt of turning my attention from Daniel for those critical minutes, and I knew that no rationalization could lighten the burden for him, any more than it could for me. With a sigh, Magnus put the past on one side.

“You wait until you hear from me. I will call, don't you fret. Now I'll just set you on your road and say goodbye.”

And with that, he guided me back past the greenhouses and through the kitchen garden, round the stable block and down a path through some trees that brought us, like the hare, to the edge of the road through the fields.

I looked back after a few steps and the solid figure raised an arm. His voice floated toward me.

“You wanted to see a cuckoo,” it called. “There she goes now,” and I realized he wasn't waving but pointing over my head. I just caught a glimpse of an undistinguished brown bird as it rocketed past, making for a stand of trees that marked the edge of the pasture. Another instant and its diminishing form vanished against the camouflage of leaves and branches, so completely gone that it was almost as if Magnus had conjured it up only to dazzle me with his sleight of hand. I turned for one last goodbye, but he had disappeared too.

The three ladies were relieved to see me sitting on the gate when they drove up. I expected them to be full of questions, but they simmered and bubbled, ready to burst, like children with a secret.

“We've got something to show you,” Miss Plover said, and Isobel squeaked in excited agreement.

We drove back to the church. They led me under the lych gate, then left the path and steered across the grass to a corner of the churchyard out of sight behind the squatting mass of the building. The grass was longer here and the graves less tended. The angel bending over one had lost her nose, and another had once held flowers in an empty jam tin, rusted now and lying on its side. We stopped beside the last grave in the angle of the wall, no more than a grassy mound with a headstone canted to one side.

“There,” said Miss Plover with quiet satisfaction.

The stone was unadorned, plain grey granite. The names glared out, softened only a little by time and a dusting of grey-green lichen.

SUSANNA CHARITY GOODMAN

1925–1941

AND

RUE TRIBULATION GOODMAN

1940–1941

I was aware of Isobel twittering about the injustice of burdening a child with such an appalling name, but I didn't even spare a thought for the hapless baby pinned down forever under it. I was doing the math.

My mother had been no more than sixteen years old when she died in the doorway of the warehouse trying to shield me with her body as the bombs fell around us and the world went up in flames.

Have you ever read Boswell's account of Dr. Johnson on horseback? It has always filled me with sympathy, that image of the great man at the mercy of the horse's inclinations, quite unable to compel it to go in the right direction or at the right speed. Waiting for Uncle Magnus to phone induced a similar feeling of helplessness, as if everything that mattered had been taken from my hands.

I didn't have the heart for much more research. I tried to find out something of my father's fate by contacting the Ministry of Defence and the War Museum, but you know how frustrating officialdom can be.

Finally, I did manage to talk to a real person who turned up three Lewis or Louis Selbys or Selbies or Selbeys. All were dead; obviously not a name that brought any luck. The most likely, since he enlisted in Reading in 1941 and put down his occupation as minister, was recorded as Missing in Action; Presumed Dead following the battle of El Alamein, and there were no more details to be harvested, apart from a birth date in 1915 in the village of Terrington St. John in Norfolk. I trudged out to the village and the local church, just to say I'd been, really, but I found no trace of any Selbys at all.

Truth is, I didn't even
want
to hunt him, or his family, down. Do you think that's strange? Somehow I knew it would be a waste of time. My father had come out of nowhere, despoiled my mother, and vanished. I couldn't imagine him with a father and mother, couldn't see him playing and fighting with siblings, going to school, looking for jobs. I couldn't even imagine him in the army, although if I'd got the right one I knew he'd been in a tank regiment. He was a solitary, unattached in any way, and he would have left no tracks. Even his death fitted the pattern; he'd gone missing and his body had never been found. Maybe he'd turned to ash in the flaming hulk of his tank, or maybe his bones still lie in the desert. Bleached white in the sand. But there'll always be the sliver of doubt, the tiny shred of possibility that he managed to disappear yet again into thin air and still shares the world with me somewhere, invisible against all the strangers. And I don't think I want to know him any better than that.

I found out about cuckoos.
The Shorter Oxford
was terse. “A migratory Eurasian grey or brown speckled bird,
Cuculus canorus
, which leaves its eggs in the nests of other birds and has a distinctive cry, the hearing of which is regarded as a harbinger of spring.”

Which explained both Uncle Magnus's comment and the triumphant letter in
The Times
but left me dissatisfied.

Miss Hoar looked up from a large botanical text with lavish coloured illustrations as I knocked on her door.

“I knew it!” she cried. “It was a bee orchid. I saw it under some trees in the churchyard the other day. I haven't seen one since I was a child!”

She slid the book toward me, and I looked obediently at the small flower under her finger, brown and yellow, distinctly reminiscent of a bee.

“Left it there, of course. They're very rare now. Sorely tempted, though.”

“Yes,” I said, “can you tell me about cuckoos?”

Miss Hoar's conversational style was so economical she saw nothing odd in this abrupt request.

“Opportunistic little beggars,” she replied. “You know about the eggs, I presume?”

“That's
all
I know.”

“It's the main thing, really. They lay their eggs and have nothing further to do with raising their young. The foster parents hatch the eggs and do all the work of feeding, and it
is
work, because the cuckoo usually chooses the nest of a smaller bird, so the parents are faced with an enormous chick with a voracious appetite.”

“Don't they notice the egg is different?”

“They don't appear to, nor do they reject the chick when it dwarfs them. Their instinct is to stuff food down that gaping beak, and that they do until the fledgling is ready to fly. Unfortunately, their efforts come at a price.”

“What's that?”

“The baby cuckoo gets so large, it fills the nest, literally, and it's so demanding that the foster parents' own chicks never get their share. They weaken, and it's an easy matter then for the cuckoo to push them out of the nest. I've got pictures somewhere.”

She surveyed a shelf of books above her bench, and her hovering finger darted at a thick tome devoted to birds. Soon she handed it to me open at a page with a series of pictures. They showed an outrageously fat baby bird, beak wide, vestigial wings flapping, in a tiny nest. A small bird had landed nearby with a beakful of food and seemed to be working out how to reach into the baby's mouth. Subsequent shots revealed another small beak wavering up at the edge of the twigs as if it had been trampled underfoot and just managed to squeeze between the cuckoo and the lining of the nest. Later shots revealed the cuckoo filling the time between parental visits by edging its wing under the other baby. Persistence brought the hapless infant onto its back and it was then an easy matter to tip it out to fall to its death.

“Parenthood without tears,” I said, “but a bit hard on the foster birds.”

“Biologically,” Miss Hoar replied crisply, “cuckoos are very successful at reproducing themselves, which is, after all, their whole reason for existence. And ethical or moral standards are irrelevant in the case of a totally amoral creature, are they not?”

I murmured neutral agreement. She couldn't know my interest was figurative. And I was struggling at the same time to understand how
cuckoo
had also, according to the dictionary, become a term for a silly person. Self-serving, maybe, exploitative and opportunistic, certainly, but daft? Never! And I should know.

I was the cuckoo's child.

Neil was much taken with my metaphor. I phoned him frequently during this time, trying to make up for the way I'd let him, and everything else at home, slide to the corners of my mind. He would call me when it was midnight in Sechelt and tell me what it was like in the house, what Maisie was doing, the noises the wind and waves were making, how Sheila and Ella had asked about me, such calm and happy images that I wondered why I didn't pack and leave immediately, why I clung to my round room in the treetops, why I had such a need to face my grandmother.

I asked about you. Not bad, said Neil. They still hadn't found a suitable donor; Dad was disqualified because of a bout of jaundice he'd had a few years ago. They were wondering about Jason, but he was very young. Perhaps if the remission lasted a while, that wouldn't be such an issue, but it was all up in the air, nothing definite, nothing guaranteed. I promised myself I'd find something really great to send you, something you'd love and never search out yourself, something you couldn't even find over there, maybe. Then I caught myself up, thinking,
What is this? A compensation prize because I feel guilty? A reminder that I'm still there and need attention, like a dog worming its way to your side and standing on your foot?
I was blushing as Neil rambled on about Ella plying him with dinner invitations because she assumed he was slowly starving on his own.

Boredom and impatience led me to walk miles. I could have got a job as a tour guide or passed the taxi driver exam by the time I'd finished hunting down ever-more obscure museums and art galleries. I pored over manuscripts and fossils, played in the Science Museum alongside schoolchildren on field trips. I browsed all seven floors at Foyles, investigated Harrods and Fortnum and Mason. I became quite nonchalant about the Underground; if you want to know how to get to Wealdstone or Walthamstow from Richmond, I can tell you.

I even spent some time with Deirdre. My new cousin was a bit of a disappointment to me, to be frank, but she's the only one I have and I thought she might become more interesting on closer acquaintance. I went down to Brighton to lend a hand when she sorted through her mother's belongings, looking for things to discard. Deirdre thought I might be helpfully ruthless, although her protests sounded terrified when I suggested she could well start with the cats, and I didn't have much hope she would bring herself to throw anything away.