The Adoption (44 page)

I was sitting upright, as if I was in school and the teacher had just walked in. The consultant, on the other hand, was reclining in his seat, as if he was resting after a relaxing swim. We eyeballed each other. It really was sweltering. The desert heat continued in the wards, to such a degree I was amazed the elderly patients did not expire from the roasting their poor sick bodies were subjected to.

‘Ah yes, the dog,’ the consultant murmured ruminatively. He steepled his fingers, his eyes behind their lenses lit with impersonal medical logic. ‘Well, I’m afraid that was a bit of a red herring.’

‘A red herring?’ I repeated, stumped. I thought she had tripped on a dog not a fish. This was surreal.

He opened his arms out and rippled his fingers on the wooden arms of the chair. ‘Yes. Oh, she’d hurt herself all right, though nothing that wouldn’t mend given time. But what we soon found was that she wasn’t eating and there were other, shall we say, more sinister signs pointing to cancer.’

‘I see … see,’ I faltered. I thought that I might faint, keel over in the chair and hit the carpet-tiled floor. Still, I supposed if I was going to collapse, here was where to do it.

At last his backbone seemed to prop him up. He adjusted his posture to accommodate it. ‘I thought that perhaps you would like to tell her.’

‘To tell her?’ I echoed.

‘To tell her how sick she really is.’

I felt weirdly protective over my adoptive mother. This shift was a stick of dynamite exploding in my reason. ‘Does she have to be told?’ I asked.

The consultant seemed taken aback. ‘These days we feel … we feel that honesty is the best approach.’

‘Do you?’ I remarked. ‘Who for?’

Now it was his turn to don feathers and squawk. ‘Who for?’

‘Yes, who for? I don’t believe my mother will benefit from the knowledge that she is dying. If I tell her, or you tell her, she will be frightened, horribly frightened. There’s no cause for that.’ My tone had become matter of fact, and I felt like the parent and not the child.

‘I wouldn’t want to mislead a patient,’ he returned, unsmilingly.

‘God forbid.’ There was a strain of sarcasm in my voice. The medical profession’s take on the world seemed unnecessarily harsh to me at that moment. ‘But,’ I suborned, ‘if you don’t say anything and she doesn’t ask, you wouldn’t be doing that.’

‘Granted,’ he conceded reluctantly.

‘So shall we just leave it? Make her … what is the word you physicians are so fond using? Oh yes, comfortable. Yes, make her comfortable. That will do.’

He nodded and began to rise. ‘But if she questions me directly, I won’t lie.’

‘Fair enough.’ We shook hands on the bargain.

And so my adoptive mother was ignorant that her moon was waning fast. I went four times in all. They called in the almoner. They said she needed new underwear and nightgowns and soap and talc.
They
said, Frank … did I know Frank? That Frank Pritchard, her nephew had power of attorney and control over her pension, that they did not know what to do. I contacted Frank and got her pension turned over to me. I purchased all that she required and a few luxuries besides, sweets mostly. She couldn’t eat but she could suck. And I could furnish this, let her sugar-coat the process of dying.

‘You’re a good girl, Lucilla,’ she whispered faintly, patting my hand. The pressure was light as a feather. ‘A good girl. Did I tell you that when you were small?’

‘No.’

‘Is it … too … too late?’

Yes, it was, far too late. But I said, no, and the flicker of a smile crossed her cracked lips. The hospital rang me on a Sunday night. My mother’s condition was fast deteriorating and could I come. It was June. A lovely June day, the sky looking as if it had been swept clean, the blue floor of it floodlit by a bronze sun. I had packed an overnight bag. I was unsure what to expect. Henry said that he could make arrangements, take the day off, accompany me. But I wanted to go by myself. This goodbye was private. I took the train from Reading to Swansea, and then another train to Haverfordwest. I had been given the name of a kindly lady who lived adjacent to the hospital and put visitors up for the night. The taxi took me there. I rushed to the hospital. At reception, I said that I’d come to see Harriet Pritchard, that I was her daughter. A nurse materialised and took me to one side.

‘Is she in the same ward?’ I said.

‘No, no. I am so sorry, Mrs Ryan. Your mother has passed. But … but if it’s any comfort her going was peaceful. She’s been moved. Moved to the mortuary.’

‘Oh,’ I said quietly. ‘She’s dead then?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ She clasped her hands under her neat bosom and assembled her face in an expression of commiseration. She looked
oriental
, and had attractive eyes actually, almond-shaped and very dark. ‘Would you like … like to see her?’

‘Yes, yes, I think that I would. I’ve come such long way you see.’

She nodded and led me down a seemingly endless corridor. Her shoes tapped smartly on the floor. The further we went the fewer doctors and nurses we saw, as if … as if we were walking purposefully out of life and into the domain of death, as if the hospital was layered. On the top floor were the beds of those who were making a full recovery, and who would be leaping about like Mexican jumping beans the second they were discharged. A few floors down and there were the
in-betweens
, the patients who fetched up somewhere in the middle of life and death, the crossroads. They might go up or alternatively they might go down. And then on the bottom floor was a tunnel that took you into the impenetrable blackness of death, into the ward where the patients lay down, never to get up again.

We went through flapping doors that gaped open as she pushed, exhaling an icy breath on us. They swung shut behind us, the jaws of death clamping closed on two warm-blooded mortals. It was dingy, the fluorescent ceiling lighting oppressive, the way it could be in some supermarkets. It made you long for natural light. More footsteps and then we came upon her, lying on a trolley, her eyes shut. I expected them to blink open, the greyish-blue mouth to poke apart in speech.
Who is that? Come closer. Lucilla? Ah, Lucilla. You’re a good girl, Lucilla, coming to see me when I’m dead. Have you brought Barbara with you?
She was covered in a sheet up to her shoulders. She’d lost so much weight that her shoulder blades were like twin peaks.

‘Would you like me to leave you for a while?’ asked the nurse gently.

‘Yes, if you could.’

‘Take your time.’ She tapped off, her heels sounding like a firing squad dispatching the condemned in the clinical vault.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t shed a single tear for the mother life had lent
me
. Instead a red-hot fist punched through me. From my mouth poured a lifetime’s repressed anger. There was no gating this torrent of words. ‘Well, Mum,’ I spat out when I was almost spent, ‘you’ve gone now and left me, finally left me with everything that’s wrong! What a waste of life, of years! You were cruel to me! It could have been so different! You never gave me a chance!’ I was dimly aware that I was shouting. ‘And you haven’t told me about my real self! You’ve held me back, held me back all my life!’ Trembling all over, I reached a hand towards her face. ‘Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!’ And with that jittery hand, I touched the mask that had haunted all my days and nights. I wanted to feel how cold she was. Coldish. Getting colder by the minute. Becoming more dead.

Head held high, I turned away and walked as sedately as I could to the swinging doors. I sidled out apologetically. It was just as well that I did not charge through them. I would have sent several nurses who were huddled there, eavesdropping on my farewell to my dead adoptive mother, flying like skittles. I must have looked the way I felt – whey faced and wrung out with emotions deep and wide as oceans.

‘Mrs Ryan, are you all right?’ It was the Chinese nurse who addressed me, peering anxiously into my face. ‘Would you like to sit down, have a cup of tea?’ I stared directly at her, saw my image in the twin mirrors of her dark almond-shaped eyes. Smothering a laugh, I decided that the apparition that gazed back at me was in worse condition than the corpse lying only feet from us. ‘Mrs Ryan?’

I regained my composure. ‘Oh yes, I’m fine now.’

‘Are you sure?’ She lowered her voice and drew me a few steps from her gawping colleagues. ‘It’s only that we could all hear you.’

I gave a huge sigh. I had been fighting for so long, and now like a soldier, the battle done, was stunned to find that I was still here. Swallowing hard, I managed, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m OK.’ It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other, walking down the corridor
towards
the main entrance. I felt their eyes drilling into me. But I wouldn’t look back. I wouldn’t swing round. I wouldn’t thank the oriental nurse for her solicitude. They must have thought I was bonkers, a total screwball. Or perhaps my little death scene had been played out before them as often as there are cards in a deck. Was it rare, this squaring up to a dead relative, this hostile reckoning, this accounting delivered as a caustic denunciation? Could it be that the extravagances of grief that brought you to your knees as your dear departed took flight, were the rarity?

The corridor seemed to stretch for miles. It felt more as if I was crawling along a tunnel than negotiating a corridor, a busy hospital corridor. Faces bobbed by, nurses’ outfits, orderlies pushing trolleys, visitors clutching flowers and squinting at signs, patients slumped in wheelchairs being steered around and around the maze. Life and death were vying for supremacy everywhere. I vowed that I would not end my days in an anonymous bleak mausoleum like this. I would prefer to lie down in a field of grass and let the rain soak into me, than slide into the eternal darkness here. I was vaguely aware of a source of light growing steadily brighter, sucking me in. Was this what a near-death experience was purported to be like? I mused wryly. The long tenebrous tunnel, the pinprick of light intensifying until it was a scream of brilliance.

And then I was loitering in a car park, shame at my outburst flaring on my cheeks. I dallied with the idea of going back, of tramping that long corridor in the other direction, leaving the light behind me. Should I apologise, offer some rudimentary explanation for my extraordinary behaviour? Should I wade through dozens of nurses until I encountered the one who had shown me the way to the morgue? Should I say, it’s all right, she’s not really my mother? We’ve only been pretending all these years. The whole thing was a hoax really, a sham.

But I had so much to sort out, her death certificate and my life. I
hailed
a taxi and told him that I needed an undertaker. He nodded as if this was a regular request on the road that ran past the hospital. As we drove, I decided that Haverfordwest, this town that had put my biological mother and my adopted mother on the same map, was rather pleasant. The undertaker, a bow-legged genial man who tried to smooth the incongruous dimples from his cheeks, took me to the registry office to fill out the certificate. Later, I rang Frank from my bed and breakfast.

‘Frank?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Lucilla. My mother has died.’ I was candid. I felt drained of emotion and my tone was impassive.

‘I thought she only had days in her. I’ll come down immediately, sort everything out.’

‘There’s no need. I’m taking care of it.’ I was perfectly capable of dealing with this. For once, Cousin Frank could take a back seat. ‘You’ll be attending the funeral?’

‘Of course,’ he replied, indignantly. ‘I can make the arrangements if you like.’

‘No, I’ve done it already. I’ve seen the undertaker.’

‘Oh!’ He sounded momentarily crushed.

‘When I’ve finalised the details, I’ll let you know.’

‘Oh!’ Now his downwards inflexion reeked of ill temper. My cousin Frank was quite out of humour. Then he reinflated, his breath voluble as a gust of north wind. ‘Well then, I suppose I’ll see you at the funeral?’

This I would savour. I too inflated, taking an unhurried lungful. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t be attending.’

‘You won’t be attending?’ he parroted back, elongating the words to exhibit his incredulity.

‘Didn’t you hear me? Have we got a faulty line?’

Oh, he was tetchy now and making no attempt at niceties. ‘I heard you perfectly well. But you can’t miss your own mother’s funeral.’

I parried nimbly, mouthing my rejoinder. She was not my mother. Then my vocal chords vibrated. ‘Yes, I can.’ I felt in control, a novel sensation when dealing with dastardly Frank.

‘I’m sorry, Lucilla, but your absence is out of the question. Being Aunt Harriet’s executor comes with huge responsibilities. She would have expected you to be there, expected me to see to it. We have appearances to consider. Now I really would like –’

‘Oh, just fuck off, Frank.’ I dismissed him and hung up. It felt liberating, the expletive on my tongue. I only hoped that my landlady had not overheard her foul-mouthed lodger.

A few days later, back in Dorking, I wrote to the vicar and made my apologies.

I had spent my teens and begun my married life in the knowledge that I had two mothers; one was the genuine article, the original, and one was a fake, devoid of any maternal instinct. And now the fake was gone. Where she had been was a gap, a vacancy, an opening to be filled. My true mother, this figure of myth and legend, doubled in value overnight. She became a priceless commodity as the prized black tulips had once been. For if one mother could die, then why not two? What if I reached the end of my quest only to be told that she had perished as well, that the two of them, once neighbours, were now companions in death. I quelled my panic by reminding myself that my birth mother was young, well … at sixty-seven younger than my adoptive mother.

Hurrying after Henry, I reflected that, four years on, hope was reborn in the guise of Bethan’s marriage certificate.

It did not take bloodhound Rosemary more than a month to find out that, on the death of her husband, Bethan had sold the farm. Hearing that a relative wanted to get in touch, the new owners were happy to supply a forwarding address in Haverfordwest. When
Rosemary
updated me in a phone call, I strived to digest the meat of her communication.