Black Cake: A Novel (17 page)

B and B, I’m so sorry that you have to hear this but you need to understand everything that has happened. The position at the trading company near Edinburgh had provided me with a refuge, a place where I could rest and begin to dream again. So, you can imagine how I must have felt the following year, when I found myself in an impossible situation. When I found myself forced to run away again.

You grow up thinking that when someone does something terrible to you, you will react, you will fight back, you will run away. I had already proven myself capable of doing this. But this time, it was as if everything had been frozen inside. I truly did not know what to do. And I had no one I could trust enough to turn to.

I went to work the next day thinking that I should say something or do something, but my supervisor acted as though nothing at all had happened. Except that I knew that it had, because he suddenly spent most of his time in his office, almost never in the main room, no longer kept me late to go over the books, never again spoke directly to me, addressed the clerical workers as a group. I should have felt shocked that he could erase everything like that but, the truth is, I was relieved. And I, too, tried to cancel out what had happened. I continued to work, go home, push the chest of drawers in front of my door at night, and lie awake for most of the hours until morning.

One day, while collecting my wages, I told my employer that I would be moving back to England. He immediately promised me a solid reference. Of course, he didn’t ask me to stay. And he didn’t ask me why I was leaving.
Because he knew what he had done. He didn’t look up at me as he spoke. He kept his eyes focused on his fingers as he picked through the stack of paychecks on his desk and handed me my envelope.

“Next,” he said, then beckoned to the office girl behind me.

Even as he let me walk out of there, I still could not give a name to what I was feeling. Something that was not quite anger, not quite fear, but a yawning kind of grief. It was only when I felt my baby jabbing and shifting inside me that I was able to focus on my affliction. When I felt that stirring in my womb, I understood two things. First, that my child would be born a girl and, second, that she must never know how she had been conceived.

I
n 1970, Eleanor was back
in London, down to her last few shillings and clutching a flyer someone had just shoved into her hand. In large print, the piece of paper read
You are not alone.
At first, she thought it was talking about God. There were churches, in those days, that advertised themselves like department stores. Then she realized the paper wasn’t talking about worship, it was talking about women like her. Unwed and pregnant. Nowhere did the blue ink of the ditto machine say it outright, but the words
young women in need
jumped out at her like a secret code.

This, after all, was what she really needed, this kind of help. Eleanor had earned enough money at the trading company to get herself back to London, trembling through the entire train journey, trying to shut out the memories of that not-too-distant accident.

Elly.

She had returned to London because she hadn’t known where else to go. But on arrival, she realized that she couldn’t go back to anything or anyone she had known here. She couldn’t afford to run into anyone who had known her or the original Eleanor. And there would be no place for her to stay once the swell of her stomach under her A-line dress became obvious to others.

But it must have been obvious already, because a middle-aged woman had thrust this piece of paper at her as she stood at a bus stop. She took a bus to the address listed on the sheet of paper and found
herself standing in front of a low brick building in a part of the city that she’d never seen before. Once there, she was given food and a place to sleep and told that she was doing the right thing. What a relief, to be surrounded by other women, even though they slept dormitory-style in a large room, with no choice but to hear one another’s sighs and snores and sobs.

The nuns told her that she couldn’t expect her child to have a decent future with a mother like her. But she’d done nothing wrong, she told them. She’d been forced. It didn’t matter, they said. What mattered was the kind of future she wanted for her child. What mattered was the work that Eleanor would not be able to find or the kinds of things that she would be compelled to do to survive. The labels that her child would have to live with. What mattered was that her child deserved better.

What the sisters meant was, her child deserved something better than Eleanor. Her child deserved something that Eleanor was not.

Eleanor wanted to keep her baby, but she saw that who you knew yourself to be on the inside was not the same as how others saw you. Who you knew yourself to be wasn’t always enough to help you make it in this world. The fact was, Eleanor could not guarantee that she and her baby would be all right.

“So that you will have a better future,” Eleanor said to the swell of her middle. So that her baby would never know the shame, she swore to herself.

Her baby. It all happened so quickly. The pain, the wet, the screams. And then it was done and Eleanor had given birth to a long-fingered creature with a sweet wail, a small birthmark at the top of her pale forehead and a damp head of black hair. Until that moment, she had not known it was possible to love another person that way.

She gave her daughter her mother’s name and nursed her for six weeks, her breasts aching at the sight of her child until the pink barnacle of her baby’s mouth latched on to her nipple. When she wasn’t nursing, she was down on her knees scrubbing floors or doing the
washing, lifting the hem of her skirt to wipe the sweat from under her chin.

One day, one of the nuns told Eleanor to put on her good dress. They put her baby in a pram, then in a taxi, and took her into an office with yellow walls and wooden filing cabinets and posters for infant-care products. A woman there had Eleanor sign a piece of paper and took the baby out of her arms.

“No, wait,” Eleanor said. “Could I just…” The baby’s snuffling erupted into a full wail as the woman carried her away down a hallway and Eleanor, too, started to cry.

“Shush, now,” the nun said on the way out. “Hold yourself like a lady.”

Eleanor left the hostel for unwed mothers determined to find her baby one day, to find a way to take her back. Everything she did from then on, she did with the thought of being able to take care of a child on her own. Finding a boardinghouse, finding a secretarial position, walking to work to save money on bus fares, walking the long way around to avoid those streets where the windows, despite the laws, still bore signs that read
No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish.

Eleanor lived off tinned fish and fruit, and managed to save a few pounds. After several months, she tried to locate the adoption office that had taken her baby, but it was no longer there. She went back to the hostel and begged the sisters to tell her where her daughter had ended up, but they threatened to call the police, to claim that she was mentally unstable.

After that, none of the good that came Eleanor’s way, not the love of a man, not the joy of giving birth again, not a plunge into the sea, would ever fully calm the undertow that had formed inside Eleanor and kept pulling her down.

On the worst nights, Eleanor dreamed of the empty pram and how, as she returned to the entrance of the home for unwed mothers, she leaned forward to see if, by some miracle, her baby had reappeared.

Years later, I would learn that there had been other young women like me in various parts of the country, women who had felt coerced into giving up their babies, but at that time, no one knew any of this. I certainly didn’t know, not for many years, until the news reports started coming out.

I can still remember those days after she’d been taken away and how, wherever I walked, I would move slowly, looking at every mother with a pram, straining to see if my baby girl was in there, stopping to compliment and coo, just to get a look at the infant. The curling fingers, the tiny mouth, always searching, always hungry. And me, alone, always searching, always hungry.

E
leanor had taken to telling
herself that her life was like one long swim.
Breathe deep and wide, take it one stroke at a time.
When you were several miles into a swim, the world could feel like an endless place. But when you were trying to stay invisible in a city where people once knew you, the streets and high-rises and bus lines and shops could squeeze in on you like a tightening net, until the inevitable—inevitably—happened.

“Well, I just didn’t know what to say,” she heard a familiar voice saying. Eleanor was standing in a queue to pay at the grocer’s near her office. She looked over at two women in another queue, who had their heads bent together now, laughing, and saw a face she knew. It was Edwina from the boardinghouse where she and Elly used to live. Edwina, from the days when Eleanor was still Covey.

Edwina was wearing her nurse’s cap and she looked so well. Eleanor had to fight the urge to cry out, to run up to Edwina, to hug her. She and Elly had spent some good times with Edwina and the other girls. But all that had to remain in the past. At any moment now, Edwina might look around and see Eleanor. Turning her face away, Eleanor set her basket of groceries on the ground and walked quickly in the opposite direction.

That was when she began to consider leaving Britain altogether. Canada and the United States were still open to immigration of educated young women from the West Indies. Eleanor had Elly’s nursing
degree and North America, after all, had been part of Elly’s plan. But Eleanor’s baby girl was somewhere in this country. And so was Gibbs. How could she bring herself to go so far away?

As the months passed, Eleanor admitted to herself that even if she could find her daughter, there was a difference between what she would be able to do for her child and the life that someone else might be able to give her. A difference as wide and deep as a canyon. She began to steel herself to accept a bitter reality, the likelihood that the path chosen for her baby, though it was killing Eleanor, might indeed have been the best for her child.

Eleanor opened her umbrella and ducked out into the rain, dragging her feet through the punishing, gray day. Closer to home, she heard a buzz of Caribbean accents, looked up, and saw a small crew of lads across the street. They were standing under the eaves of a building, apparently waiting for the rain to abate.
Good luck,
she muttered under her breath. Then she stopped and looked again.

One of the men looked back across the street at her. There was no mistaking it. She knew that man. That man was Gibbs and in a moment, she was Covey all over again. Here was the boy she’d been forced to give up when her father had married her off to Little Man. Here was the love she was meant to marry. Here was the man she had feared she might never see again.

“Gibbs!” Covey tried to shout but her voice wouldn’t come out. She stepped off the curb to cross the street but her legs wouldn’t hold her.

Gibbs had been through this before. Certain he’d seen Covey when he knew that she was dead. It would happen every once in a while. He would see her on a bus, on a bridge, in a store. Missing someone could have that kind of power over you.

After Gibbs learned that Covey had disappeared off the coast back home, he felt like giving up. He didn’t know anymore what he was
doing all the way over here. He hadn’t found the mother country as welcoming as he’d expected, nor all his professors as supportive as he’d hoped. It was only his determination to prove them wrong in their doubt of him that kept him going. What would he do if he went back, anyway, knowing that he wouldn’t find Covey there? His parents were already gone. Gibbs’s mother had been ill for a while and soon after she’d passed on, so had his father. Dead of a broken heart, his uncle said.

And then Bunny called. She reached him by long-distance operator to tell him the whole story. How Covey had survived, how Covey had escaped to England and why Bunny and Pearl hadn’t told him. So close, she had been so close, but this time, she really was gone. Covey had been killed in that terrible rail accident up north, and this time they had the documents to prove it, the authorities had her photo.

Gibbs hadn’t known until that moment that he’d had any heart left to break. First, his parents, and now this. How did a man survive something like this? He went to bed and stayed there for weeks until one of his professors, one of the kind ones, offered to help him pull his studies back together. Gibbs was exceptional, his professor said, he could do it, and Gibbs let himself be pulled along.

When Gibbs saw Covey standing on the far side of a London street this time, he assumed that it was just another one of his daydreams. He still thought about the plans that he and Covey had made together, to pursue their studies, to raise a family. He still thought of the swim club where he’d first met her, of the cove where they had first kissed. Five long years had passed. But he could see that this wasn’t an illusion. He could see that the young woman across the street knew him. She was mouthing his name, reaching an arm out toward him. It was a wonder that Gibbs didn’t faint, too, when he realized that Covey was still alive.

Gibbs ran across the road and caught Covey before her face could hit the ground. When Covey came to, Gibbs was holding her in his arms and he never did let go again until the day he died, four decades later. Covey and Gibbs had found each other again.