In Her Mothers' Shoes (36 page)

‘Is it a …?’

‘No! Don’t say a word.’ David held two fingers up to his lips. ‘Wait for Kate.’

Rose went through into the sitting room where Amelia was entertaining her grandfather with her latest toy, posting moulded shapes into matching holes around a plastic sphere, and Kate was sitting next to him on the high-winged sofa, smiling. Rose did as instructed and extracted four champagne flutes from the mahogany chiffonier, placed them on the silver tray on top and waited for David to pour.

‘So, what’s the news?’ she said when everyone had a glass.

‘We’re having another baby,’ Kate said, beaming. ‘At last.’

‘That’s wonderful.’ Rose and George both laughed. ‘Congratulations!’

They each held up their glasses in a toast and took a sip.

‘Real French champagne,’ Kate said. ‘I’d better make the most of it. The new advice is not to drink when you’re pregnant.’

‘We’d better be careful then. It’s been quite a journey getting here.’ David gulped half his glass. ‘Boy that tastes good.’

‘Hey, what’s the hurry?’ Kate held up her glass. ‘It’ll be good for you to join me in abstinence.’

‘Really?’ David examined his glass then swallowed another mouthful. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t hurt.’

‘Maybe it’s a boy this time,’ Kate said.

‘Maybe it’s twins.’ Rose knew her daughter had been taking fertility pills. After it had taken such a long time to produce Amelia, Kate had said she was going straight back on them. She was getting too long in the tooth for having babies, she’d said, and wanted to move the next one along.

Kate had never been patient, never been one to sit back and wait for something to happen; ever since she was a child, she’d known how to boss people around to get her own way, to push things along so they fitted into her timetable. And people let her do it. Rose had often chided herself for letting her daughter take over, but such was the force of her will, it seemed impossible to foil her.

Where did that strong will come from? Not from herself, surely? Maybe it was the birth mother, Elizabeth. Maybe she’d been a determined young woman too. She’d often wondered what had become of her, after she’d given her baby away. Had she remarried? Had she gone on to have a family of her own? She hoped so, for her sake.

‘Twins would be too much for me at my ripe old age.’

David looked aghast. ‘Me too.’

‘Are we going to have two babies, Mummy?’ Amelia stopped posting the coloured wooden shapes into the hexagonal box, jumped down off the couch and ran to Kate, climbing on her lap. ‘I want a baby brother
and
a baby sister.’

‘One at a time!’

‘Oh I don’t know.’ Rose grinned.

Kate pulled a face.

‘Now, I must go and check on the fish pie.’

‘My favourite, Mum, you spoil me. Can I help?’

‘No, you stay here with Grandpa. You can set the table in here though. We can use the fish knives and forks.’

As soon as she’d said it, she wished it unsaid. Those damned fish knives and forks. Antiques, made of bone and sterling silver, a gift from Aunt Doris, they’d initially been intended for Kate as a wedding present but then Doris decided Kate’s husband wasn’t good enough for her – or nice enough to Doris – and had given them to Rose instead. There was no present for Kate. Doris didn’t even come to the wedding, which Kate pronounced a blessing. Rose was inclined to agree with her.

She was like that, Doris, changing her favours on a whim, becoming thoroughly vindictive and even downright nasty when she decided she didn’t like someone – often for a minor infringement like being born Catholic, or failing to agree with her on the choice of Prime Minister.

Rose had been on the receiving end of her rudeness more than once. Right up to the day she’d died, Aunt Doris had borne a grudge against her for some unknown slight and had left half her estate to some very distant relative in Dunedin who’d had very little to do with her – except kowtow from a distance – and the other half to Rose, her closest relative in all ways. Rose would like to say it wasn’t the loss of half the estate that hurt – but it was. It would have made all the difference in getting the care for George that she needed. There wasn’t a lot of money involved – but there was even less after half had gone to the southern interloper and there had been too little to buy the electric wheelchair and hoist, let alone provide a part-time nurse for extra care. Rose was finding, in her advancing years, that the constant attention he required was exhausting. Not that she would ever admit it to Kate.

Kate had been furious at Aunt Doris’s slight to her mother and never wasted an opportunity to show it, even now.

‘Oh, the Great Aunt Doris memorial fish knives and forks,’ Kate said sarcastically. ‘Honestly, Mum, of all the domestic implements man has created I would have to say bone-handled fish knives and forks would have to be among the most useless. I mean, what possible . . .?’

‘I know, I know,’ Rose soothed. ‘Sorry I mentioned them. Put out whatever you like on the table, as long as we can eat with it.’

She retreated to the kitchen with her glass of champagne; she didn’t want David polishing it off. She’d grown fond of David over the years – it had taken time after his cavalier treatment of Kate when they’d first gone out together – but he’d proven himself a caring husband, a good provider and a doting father. And he was kind to George, listening to his endless theories, debating politics and current affairs. But he did have a fondness for the drink.

Pulling down the kitchen blinds against the chill twilight, she flicked a wry smile at the reflection of herself in the window. Aunt Doris had a lot to answer for. The fish knives and forks were only a tiny part of the problems she’d caused.

Ever since she’d come to live in Christchurch Doris had become increasingly difficult, holding her wealth – diminished though it may be – and her antiques as an enticement for her family to be nice to her. One false move and you’d be cut out of her will. Kate used to say she’d been disinherited so many times she’d forgotten whether she was in the will or out – and she’d stopped caring.

But that hadn’t stopped her and Kate from swooping down on Doris’s house the day after she’d died – and the day before the distant relative from down south made her own swoop north – to collect those treasures of Rose’s mother that had fallen into Doris’s hands. She remembered the glee with which she and Kate had made the raid, and the snippy comments from the southern imposter, who’d inquired the next day after every ring and bracelet, every piece of bone china, even the ugly ormolu clock, as if it were the last treasure of Tutankhamen. What amused Rose, even now three years on, was the incredible detail the imposter knew of such things when she’d visited Doris in Christchurch just the one time. It was Rose’s belief she’d carried out an inventory of the place – of all the drawers and cupboards – every time Doris had gone to the bathroom or after she’d retired for the evening.

The fish knives and forks had been on her list. 

After Doris died, Rose had tried to give them to Kate. ‘She’s dead now. She can’t take them off you any more.’

‘You can keep them, Mum. Doris isn’t my real family anyway.’

Which had hurt even more than Doris’s unending rejection of her daughter.

She hardly thought about it these days, about Kate being adopted, being from another gene pool. It was more than thirty years since Rose and George had signed that piece of paper promising never to tell Kate about her origins, promising to keep her birth mother’s name a secret and pretending, whenever Kate had asked, that they didn’t know the woman’s name. She’d almost forgotten the awful feeling of guilt each time she’d denied Kate the truth about her origins. Kate hadn’t mentioned it for a long time. But she obviously hadn’t forgotten.

Rose often wondered how Kate would have turned out if she hadn’t adopted her. Sometimes she thought her daughter wasn’t like her at all, and sometimes she could see similarities – and not just in the blue eyes and brown hair, even though Kate had dyed hers auburn these past ten years. The similarities were more in her behaviour – always busying herself, never sitting still for long, making sure her diary was crammed with appointments. And her optimism. Rose felt she could take some of the credit for that at least.

They’d made sure Kate had always known she was adopted – when she was about four, as soon as they thought she could understand, they’d told her. Rose remembered buying a distinctive pale orange and green-covered book,
The Chosen Baby
.

George would settle in his favourite armchair in front of a blazing coal fire in the living room, sit his daughter on his knee and read aloud, pointing at the orange and green pictures, answering Kate’s questions about her own adoption.

‘Did you come to a hospital like that and pick me out?’

‘Was it because I had blue eyes like you and Mummy?’

‘Would you still have adopted me if I didn’t smile at you?’

‘Was Vicki-Jane adopted too?’

And when George had patiently answered and managed to turn all the pages, it was always the same:

‘Read it again, Daddy,’ she’d say as soon as George closed the cover. ‘Again please.’

And George would open it up and start once more at the first page: ‘Once upon a time . . .’ and tell for possibly the hundredth time the story of Mr and Mrs Brown and how their baby Peter and, after a few more years, his sister Mary, were adopted into a home where they were wanted and loved.

The Chosen Baby
seemed to have satisfied Kate’s thirst to know her origins long after it was consigned to the bookcase and replaced by other books at her bedside –
Swallows and Amazons, Ballet Shoes, The Incredible Journey
.

It wasn’t until she’d turned thirteen that she wanted to know more, that the simple explanations in
The Chosen Baby
failed to suffice. That was the year that she first demanded to know who her ‘real’ mother was.

All her teenage years she kept asking, writing letters to her mother – with no address to send them to – throwing tantrums over not being told the truth and trying to find out for herself. Rose had felt like a criminal at the time, denying her daughter the one thing she most wanted to know, and she still felt bad about it to this day. But the Social Security Department had insisted it be kept a secret. She and George had signed a deed promising that’s what they would do. It was part of the deal, part of the price they’d paid for being given Katharine for keeps: they could tell her she was adopted, but no more.

And now it looked as if the secret was to be revealed and Kate would be able to find out for herself. Rose had seen the stories in the paper about the law change. Undoubtedly Kate would have seen them too, but she’d never said a word.

Should she give Kate the piece of paper, long buried in George’s deed box, the birth certificate containing her daughter’s original name – the name her birth mother had given her – as well as her mother’s and father’s names?

She couldn’t. She and George had made a promise. And it wouldn’t be right to expose the birth mother to scrutiny after all these years, risk ruining her life, whatever that might be. What if she had a family of her own? She might not have told her husband or her children. What then? Rose couldn’t be responsible for that. Or what if she had gone on having relationships outside wedlock?