As I picked it up the latch flipped open of its own accord – for some reason it had not been properly closed – and this felt like an invitation to look inside. In my heart I understood it was a wrong thing to do, but the secrecy surrounding his Masonic activities made me so very curious. I lifted out the gold badge and a medal on ribbons, and what looked like a blue silk collar and a square bag, heavily embroidered with symbols and letters in gold and red. Underneath were some papers which I tried to read, but they were full of long religious-sounding words that meant little to me, written in an archaic kind of script that was so difficult to decipher that I quickly gave up.
I was about to put everything back when I noticed the small buff envelope. It had already been opened, slit carefully with a paper knife as Arthur always does, and looked like an invoice. Curious to check how much he might be paying to the Masons, I pulled out the single sheet of thick, cream bond and unfolded it.
My dear Brother,
it said.
Regarding our discussion the other evening, please come to Helena Hall this evening at 9pm for receipt of said item. At the security gate ask for me and the guards will direct you to my office.
Roger.
Well, I thought nothing of it – this was probably just a simple message between friends. I put away the papers and replaced everything as I had found them, shut the case as best I could and put it back into the cupboard.
As you know, for it was your childhood home, we lived in a small
cul de sac
and the children could play on the green in front of our houses without danger of traffic. We gave you a bicycle and you stayed out there every evening with the other children until it grew dark.
One evening I went to call you in and met a woman also waiting for her children, who smiled in a friendly way and we got chatting. Her name was Mary and she told me that she was a nurse. She was very excited because that very day she had been accepted for a new job. ‘At Helena Hall, you know, the mental institution? It’s just up the road.’ Helena Hall. The mystery was solved – Arthur’s Masonic colleague worked at a hospital.
Mary and I became great friends and she liked to drop in after her shifts and gossip about what was happening at work. One day, in a lowered voice, she told me about the latest scandal. ‘Apparently Lord B was having an affair and Lady B found out about it and threatened to go to the press. So he took her to the doctor and bribed him to certify her.’
I was shocked. ‘She’s locked up in a mental hospital even though she’s completely sane?’
Mary nodded. ‘In a private villa, mind. That’s how he buys off his conscience. And she’s not the only one.’
‘Not the only woman locked up because her husband is having an affair?’
‘Because someone wants them out of the way. There’s a couple of younger women who claim to have been locked up because they inconveniently got pregnant out of wedlock and their families don’t want anyone to know.’
‘What do you mean, “claim”?’
‘That’s what they say, but of course there’s no proof, because they are supposed to be insane, after all, hearing voices and inventing fantasies. And in any case, there are no babies to show for it.’
My heart turned over. ‘But what if they are telling the truth? Where did the babies go?’ I managed to whisper through the lump blocking my throat.
‘Just slipped away, I expect. Given up for adoption or something,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘Goodness, is that the time? Peter will be home for his supper any moment, and I haven’t even peeled the potatoes. Love to Arthur, see you later.’
Her words rang in my head:
Just slipped away. Given up for adoption
. What if – my mouth went dry at the prospect – you were one of those babies from Helena Hall? Was that what the letter to Arthur was all about? Had the birth mother of my child been imprisoned in a secure ward through no fault of her own except that she was unfortunate enough to get pregnant? I became transfixed by the thought that you might have been the child of some poor girl, who was still mourning the loss of her son, fourteen years on. I was horrified and desperate to have my suspicions proved unfounded, but couldn’t tackle Arthur, because he would either deny it or just refuse to talk to me.
One day Mary told me the hospital had opened a new sewing room to give patients a craft. ‘They need volunteers to help,’ she said. ‘You’d be perfect.’
The idea was alarming but at least I would get to see inside the place and perhaps be able to discover for myself whether these rumours about women being locked up for ‘inconvenient’ pregnancies had any basis in fact. In any case, Mary’s stories about the place had intrigued me and, now that you were at school, I really needed some activity to occupy the long days and my active mind.
‘I’ll have to ask Arthur,’ I said, tentatively.
‘Oh, don’t!’ she blurted out, and then tried to recover herself. ‘I mean, don’t ask him right away. Give it a day or so and if you really enjoy it then ask him. Say it’s about helping the community, or something …’ I got her drift. Your father’s first reaction would be to say no, and then where would I be?
Since I could get there and back while you were at school and he was at work, no one would ever know. I decided to give it a try.
On my first day I was welcomed at the entrance by a woman in a smart dark blue uniform who introduced herself as Matron of the Female Side and said she needed to go through a few questions before we went to the sewing room. When she asked my name I panicked. What if Arthur should find out from his Masonic colleague that his wife had volunteered without asking him? He’d blow a gasket. So I said the first name that came into my head – that of our Queen’s second child, Margaret. On the wall above her head was a noticeboard with a list of all the ward names and their telephone extension numbers.
‘Langham,’ I blurted, choosing a name at random. ‘Margaret Langham.’ Then I gabbled out a false address, and to my relief there were no more questions.
The sewing room was just as you would imagine any normal production room: a long rectangle, well lit with windows all along one wall, and electric light bulbs hanging over each of the tables – about eleven of them in rows from front to the back of the room. Along the front were ten treadle sewing machines and at the back was the cutting table.
In no time at all I was sitting with a group of women doing hand sewing – repair work mostly, and hemming. My job was to help if needed, look after the scissors and to count the needles and pins at the start and end of each session. Their skill and the variety of work was impressive: while the hand-sewers were darning and repairing, the machinists efficiently ran up new staff uniforms and patient clothing. They even sewed for stage sets when the staff put on plays in the great hall, and bunting for the dances.
Although the women were generally calm and seemed fairly sane to me, they all appeared old before their time, pallid and unhealthy, their hair straggly and unkempt, their clothes ill-fitting. And when I tried to engage them in conversation, they replied in monosyllables, looked away or, worse, looked back at me with heavy-lidded, uncomprehending eyes. The supervisor explained that most of them were on drug therapy to control their moods and delusions. But once in a while I would get a shy smile which was reward enough. The three hours whizzed by and I found myself looking forward to next week, when I would return.
One of the patients interested me more than the others, perhaps because she was closer to me in age. She was tiny, quite childlike in stature, and must have been pretty once upon a time, with her dark curls and almost black eyes. Though she never uttered a word, her eyes were always bright and interested. If she wanted to say something she would write on scraps of paper in a sprawling, uneducated hand. Her name, the others said, was Queenie.
‘Dumb,’ the supervisor said, bluntly. ‘Used to be able to talk, in fact we couldn’t shut her up. But after the narcosis therapy she stopped. Sometimes they do that, just to annoy us.’
One day, as we were hemming dresses for patients, she seemed to be mouthing a word. It sounded like ‘
quilt
’, and she smiled when I repeated it. Perhaps she wants to do some patchwork, I thought, so I went to town to buy a bag of scraps from the drapers. She didn’t show them much interest, and the following week she wrote: ‘
quilt what got lost
’.
I made dozens of enquiries, and even braved going to see the matron, all to no avail. Eventually, I wrote to the superintendent. To cut a very long story short, we eventually found her scrap of quilting in an old bag which had been hidden in a basement since she arrived here.
She set to work with a will to complete the enterprise she’d started so long ago. As she sewed, little by little, she found more words, and as her speech returned she became much more friendly, laughing and gossiping with me, and the others, as she worked. Watching her confidence grow, I could hardly imagine why she should ever have found herself in such a place.
One day she told me that she was going to sew this panel of quilt for her baby, proudly showing me the design which included a row of figures: a duck, an apple, a violin, ivy leaves and a dragon, which spelled the word D.A.V.I.D. ‘His name,’ she said. I asked where David was now, imagining that he was being cared for by her family outside.
‘He died,’ she said. ‘The night he was born.’
I said how sorry I was, and thought not much more about it until a few months later when the quilt was starting to take shape, she had finished the appliqué figures that spelled out the name of her baby, and had started embroidering figures along the sides of the panel.
‘What do these mean?’ I asked, all unawares.
‘My baby’s birthday,’ she said, and my blood ran cold. For now I could see clearly that the figures I had taken to be an abstract design, were in fact four numbers: 11.11. On the other side was another number one and a nine, and another one, beside which she had begun to embroider a number eight. She was writing the date on which you had been born: 11.11.1918.
My head began to spin with the thought that her baby might, just conceivably, be the same child as my own lovely boy. But I told myself not to be silly, to think rationally. Her baby had died. In any case, the medical staff all agreed that she was a fantasist, so almost everything she said should be treated with suspicion. I’d developed a loyalty to the place, and particularly to this woman. I had built up a friendship with her. She seemed to trust me, and I enjoyed her company.
So, the following week, I pressed her again to talk about her child, feeling sure that she would tell me again that he had died, so that I need no longer feel the ache of guilt each time I talked to her.
‘That’s such a lovely way of remembering him,’ I said, as she appliquéd a new row of figures, starting with a mouse, which spelled out her real name: Maria.
She stopped sewing and looked me straight in the eye.
‘I don’t tell many this, but I likes you, Margaret.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘They said he died, but I’m sure I heard him cry.’
That was the moment, my dearest boy, when my agony began. The moment I became convinced you were that baby, and terrified that you might be taken from me. Imagine the horror: a woman wrongfully incarcerated by some heartless man, had her baby stolen, and still grieving fourteen years later.
I am ashamed to admit that I ran away that day, never to return. I could not face her again. I concocted a weak excuse for the hospital, although my friendship with Mary cooled from then onwards – I think she knew that I was lying, though she never knew why.
My initial terror of being found out, of losing you, slowly eased and in its place came the guilt, its insidious acid etching my mind with its poisons. I rarely slept but, when I did, I would wake a few hours later feeling strangely at ease with life until, a few seconds later, my conscience would ambush me all over again with that ferocious clawing at my heart, like an enraged animal. I imagined it might be the same for that poor woman, as she woke each morning, remembering all over again her loss.
Whenever I touched you, stroked your hair, or held your hand, I felt like weeping. The love for you that had once been complete and unconditional was now unlawful, even immoral, because you had been stolen from another woman. You were no longer mine to keep.
Over and over and over in my mind I replayed the conversation. Had I imagined everything? Had I jumped to ridiculous conclusions? Each time, my conviction grew that you were indeed her son. But you had none of her looks: she was small, olive skinned and dark haired; your hair was blond and your skin was creamy, becoming golden each year in summertime. She was tiny, you were average sized for your age, and still growing. So where did you get these looks?
It pains me to admit that we will probably never know, my dearest boy, who your father is, or was. How could I ever find out, without raising suspicions or revealing your identity? I could tell no one, and thus could seek no help. I was jittery in my skin, withdrawn and prone to crying at the slightest thing, unable to concentrate even on the simplest everyday tasks such as following a recipe or a knitting pattern. Though usually careful with my skin care and make-up, I began to neglect myself.
Looking back, I can now see with dreadful, painful clarity, how remote I became towards the people I loved most: you, and your father. And this made me feel even more guilty. Arthur, my poor kindly husband, could never understand why his wife, formerly so loving and attentive, had withdrawn from him, almost overnight.
You were growing up of course, heading away from us towards your adult life, busy with your friends and your studies – you were always a naturally bright boy. Each time you returned with a good school report I would recall Queenie’s sharp, intelligent mind, despite the fact that she appeared to have had little or no schooling.
Over the weeks and months, I began to lose touch with reality. One day, as Arthur tells it, he returned from work to find the doctor by my bedside. You had come home from school to find me in bed, weeping uncontrollably, and called the surgery. My heart was beating nineteen to the dozen, I was trembling all over and my limbs were so heavy I could barely move, even to go to the bathroom. The doctor called it an ‘episode of nervous exhaustion’, but I now know that it was a breakdown.