The Cuckoo's Child (24 page)

I said nothing and let him take his time. I could tell already he would be impossible to hurry; even his speech, with its lovely broad vowels and lilting cadence, was leisurely, although there was a force to it, and he wanted no argument.

“My younger sister was killed in an air raid in London in 1941,” he began. “She shouldn't have been there, but there you are, those things happen. She had a little girl, one year old or so, maybe less. The child died too. They were found together and identified eventually, and my dad brought them back home to be buried, lying together in the same coffin. I don't think he ever got over that; he were a sad old man the rest of his days. And I saw them laid in the earth. I stood beside my dad, and we saw them home together, and I cried, I don't mind saying. And there's the headstone on the grave, plain as a pikestaff for all to see, with the two names. My old dad put his foot down about that, insisted, he did, and got his way for once, poor old chap. So you see, it doesn't add up, does it? I'm sorry if it's a disappointment, but it'd be best to forget the notion and lay it to rest.”

“But you haven't heard my story yet.”

“That I haven't, but there's no getting round those two bodies in that grave, is there? My dad saw them both. He knew.”

“I'm sure there are two bodies in the grave. In fact, I
know
there are. It's just that the baby wasn't your sister's child.”

“What are you saying?” he asked, then went on to tell me, “You're saying that some baby was buried by mistake with my sister? How am I to believe that? You expect me to believe there just happened to be
another
baby on that street? And what happened to my niece, then? Got up and walked away, did she? Come on now, you'll have to do better than that! My dad had to identify them. And he did. Said he just had to take one look at my sister even though . . . and the baby's red curls. D'you suppose he'd say they were his kin if they weren't?”

“I don't suppose that for a minute. But think a bit. It's not always easy to identify people, especially when they've died from head injuries, especially when some time has elapsed before you see the body. I don't suppose they were knocking on your door with the news right after it happened, were they? Maybe your father recognized your sister some way and more or less assumed the baby was hers. Babies look alike. It would be a reasonable assumption.”

He was looking at me strangely.

“How did you know that?” he asked slowly. “How did you know she died of head injuries?”

I was caught. The detail had slipped out heedlessly. The small fact had seized his attention; I could tell he was no longer disposed to usher me out without listening. But I wouldn't be able to capitalize on his curiosity without telling him about Mum and Dad's strange role.

“It's a long story,” I said. “Would you like to hear it?”

“I'm listening,” he said grimly and settled back with his arms folded, as imperturbable and incorruptible as a cricket umpire.

For a while there, I became Scheherazade, fighting to keep a reluctant Sultan hooked. Not that I was trying to entertain; it was much more a question of the hard sell to a cynical customer. But we had one thing in common, that inventive strategist and I: a desperate wish to keep ourselves alive, she literally, and I, well, wasn't it literal for me too? Wasn't I struggling to inhabit a life that had been waiting for me all those years? And if I failed to convince this monolithic slab of a man that I was his niece, what would remain but a retreat into what I could only think of as an alias? I would be like a permanent ward of the Witness Protection Program.

I told him everything. At first he listened sternly, witholding any hint of involvement. There was no more give in him than there is in a glass slipper. When I explained how I had stumbled on the fact I was not related to the people I had always called my family, a shadow crossed his face, and his arms, which up to then had been tightly folded as if to keep himself intact, relaxed. By the time I reached Mum and Dad's flight with a dead child through the air raid, he was reaching into his pocket for a pipe and an oiled silk pouch, banging the dottle from the pipe on the corner of the bench, and filling it one handed with tobacco that smelled as sweet as any flower. His hands froze, holding a lighted match, when I told of their discovery in the doorway in Fenning Street, and his exclamation and violent start as the flame burned his fingers punctuated with impeccable timing my account of Mum laying down her dead child and picking me up.

I pointed out my similarity to the dead child that enabled Mum and Dad to maintain the fiction I was their daughter. I explained their lack of contact with any sharp-eyed relatives or neighbours who might have noticed a difference, the way their real daughter's ration book, identity card, and birth certificate gave an unarguable foundation to my identity and prevented any problems that might have arisen, and how my own youth made me the perfect accomplice and war the perfect setting.

Finally, I laid the gas mask and its case, the scrap of paper, and the tiny envelope on the bench by his elbow and told him that these had been found with me and were the only clues to my identity. He settled a pair of half-glasses on his nose and picked the items up one by one. He grunted, an involuntary bark of surprise, when he found the name written on the strap, but he flashed a look over the spectacles at me and shook his head.

“R for Ruth,” he said almost to himself, then looked at me. “'Twasn't the child's name, you know,” but then, as if he couldn't help himself, “but 'twas her name for the little maid, right enough.”

I was longing to ask what the name should have been, and why my mother hadn't used it, but I didn't want to interrupt his inspection. My caution paid off. He picked up the scrap of paper with Sarah's address on it and stiffened.

“My oath,” he breathed and laid his pipe, which had gone out, on the bench. Still holding the paper, he reached for the envelope and peered at the faint writing. A strange little noise escaped him and his hand went to his mouth. I was stunned to see a tear trickling down his cheek, but still I kept silent.

“I thought you were just having me on,” he said finally, “though why you'd bother, I can't rightly say. But I believe you now, and I'll tell you, it's not your clever story as did it, it's these here”—gesturing at the paper and envelope—“I know where this bit of paper come from. I should. I tore it out my very own self, stole it from Mother's book to give to my poor sister. And this here”—fingering the packet of seeds—“I'd know that hand anywhere. Don't I see it every day of my life? Look here.”

He pointed to the cabinet full of drawers.

“That's my dad's writing on all those labels, see?”

I bent closer to look at the elegant copperplate, written with a fine pen, the downstrokes broad and the upstrokes mere threads of ink. Magnus held the envelope close to one of the drawers.

“Now,” he said, “see here.”

The label on the drawer read
STEPHANOTIS
. The name on the envelope was like an echo, faint but unmistakably the same. He slid open the drawer and inside lay the same downy seeds I had found in the packet. It wasn't proof of anything, yet it felt like a smoking gun. I looked at Magnus. He looked at me.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it's a facer, but I seem to have found a niece, and I never thought to say that.”

“Uncle Magnus,” I asked, the words odd in my mouth, “what is my real name?”

His face fell serious again.

“Ah now, there's a thing,” he said evasively. “What have they called you all these years?”

“Livvy, short for Olivia.”

“Well, you might want to stick with that. That's a pretty name. I don't reckon you'll much fancy the name you were given here.”

“But what
was
it?”

“My old dad, he were right against it. ‘You can't call the little maid that,' he said, ‘'twill be a millstone round the child's neck.' But she would have it; made the old man go and register the birth, not a second would she wait.”

“Who wouldn't? My mother?”

“Lord bless you, no!
My
mother, that were. Your mother would have given you some dainty name out of her poetry books, but she never got the chance.”

“You're driving me mad, you know! What's my name? Something awful like Bertha or Gladys?”

Uncle Magnus looked flushed and embarrassed.

“That wouldn't be so bad,” he said. I wondered what on earth it could be if that wasn't so bad. Blodwen? Hagar? My uncle took the plunge.

“The name on your birth certificate—and none of us wanted it, remember, except Mother—is . . . Rue. Rue Tribulation,” he finished in a rush.

“Rue? As in the herb?”

“Well, more like ‘you'll rue the day.'”

“Oh, I see. And Tribulation too. Can I take it my grandmother wasn't too smitten?”

The sound Uncle Magnus made wasn't really a word, but it was eloquent. It was part sigh, part groan, a sad, resigned acceptance of the way things were, a melancholy commentary on the nastiness of some, on the waste of lives, on his own ineffectual contribution, a wry shrugging of the shoulders as if to say, “What's the good, when all's said and done?”

“Why? What was wrong with me? You've got a story to tell as well, haven't you?”

Uncle Magnus heaved himself out of his chair.

“Let's take a walk,” he said.

I hope you're taking this in, Stephen, wherever you are. We're coming to the part of the story that smacks of dream worlds, of lurid Gothic emotion, the stylized excess and lunacy that hangs about the subconscious and peeks out in nightmare.

All the more dramatic for me, recounted as it was in my uncle's slow countryman's voice while we ambled through the Eden that is his kingdom. We started off by entering another walled garden—and isn't that what the source of the word
Paradise
means?—and strolled the outer circular path past the fruit trees heavy with buds, the currant and gooseberry bushes, the espaliered fruit clutching the brick, and the glass house on the south side that sheltered the white peaches.

The order and abundance formed the backdrop to Magnus's account of his youth. He told me about his father, Adam Goodman, who was also the head gardener like his father before him, and about his mother, Esther, as we sat on the parapet of a large pond at the centre of the garden and dangled our hands in the water. Big goldfish, used to being fed, rose lazily to the surface and sucked on our fingertips while Magnus told of his mother's autocratic rule and her fearsome religion that branded everyone a sinner and admitted very few to salvation.

“Primitive Baptist she is,” he said. “I don't hold with all that miserable nonsense, not after what happened, but I had to wait till I was grown to get away from it. Hale us all to chapel, she would, two, three times a week sometimes, so we could hear just how wicked we were. No hope for sinners like us, I can tell you! And Sundays! What a misery. No going out, no games, no hobbies, no books even, except for the Bible. We used to sneak out when we could and play in the woods, but then we were even more damned and got sent to bed without our supper to pray for forgiveness. Worth it, though, just to get away from the house, and Dad used to creep upstairs with apples and bits of bread when he could. He didn't like it, but those days raising children was the woman's job—he was too busy putting food on the table to interfere, and he got the sharp edge of her tongue when he did, anyway. He were a quiet soul, my dad. I expect he reckoned she were a good woman and couldn't do no harm. Besides, he were fond of her for all her waspish ways. It were just easier to leave things be.

“My two sisters had the worst of it. None of us had friends, couldn't really, when we weren't allowed out, never went anywhere. None of us ever thought about bringing anyone home from school for tea or anything like that. And all this for a playground! Wicked, that was. But I used to go with Dad sometimes, fishing, shooting pigeons, out to the market, just working. She allowed that because I was a boy, and that's what the men did. But the girls! They might as well have been nuns for all they saw of the world.

“And that was part of the trouble, of course. She thought she was keeping them safe, I don't doubt, but when you've no experience, that makes you an easy target for all the things she was so busy keeping them from. Trusting, they were, both Susanna and Sarah, could recite the Bible, chapter and verse, but knew as much about the world as babes in arms. Murphy come to the door one day, selling brushes. Sarah took one look at him, curly hair and enough sweet talk to rot your teeth, and that was that. I don't know how she arranged it, but she went off to Bible study with Susanna one evening and only the one came back. Next we know, she was writing to say she was wed and living in London. I don't know if Sarah ever really got married, or whether she were just saying that to make it look better when the baby arrived. Murphy didn't stick around for long anyway; he run off after the war, and we never heard another word.”

We had wandered past a rose garden and herbaceous borders, the plants neatly pruned and mulched, the ground raked smooth and absolutely weed-free, and were now approaching a lawn. I let out a muffled “Oh!” for at the far side appeared the house and the dovecote from Miss Hoar's book. As if on cue, a cloud of white birds circled and landed in front of us. They were fantail pigeons, and as we watched, some of the males puffed out their breasts like spinnakers, spread their tails fully, and ran to and fro in front of the females as if they were on wheels. They reminded me irresistibly of overweight Italian tenors, throbbing with unrequited love and high Cs.

“We'll go this way,” said my uncle. “Lordy's home.”

“Who?”