The Fish Ladder (29 page)

I am waiting for an old frayed queen

To walk to that window:

She who shines like the Moon,

But shits on the walls,

She whose house has no books in it

Or bath.

She who stares at her dead child

And never tidies away

Its rat-eaten cradle clothes . . .

Waiting for whatever hard worked mother

Owns those feathery bones.

My fingers caught the stone slab and I hauled myself out of the water. My nose, ears, eyes, lungs were choked with it. Pain seared my chest, from the recent surgery, but I felt that I might drown if I let go of the stone. I could hear Evie shriek behind me. I had stepped off the footpath into a patch of water the size of a puddle. I couldn’t help laughing, even as I hauled myself free. Everything that I knew, all I had been told, about the hazards of walking in a bog. The peat around the fixed stone footpath had formed a pocket, and this pocket had worked outwards, but mostly downwards, to form a dubh loch as treacherous as any I might have found in Scotland. Practise what you preach, check the depth of any water with a stick, no matter how small the surface. I laughed even as I tended to the tearing pain across my chest.

Evie hovered, anxious. I was glad that I had done it. I was glad that she had been there, that she had learned, with no harm done, that the moors are not to be fooled with. Once it was clear that I wasn’t going to die she became a little sterner.

‘You’re covered in dirt.’

‘It’s only water.’

‘It’s very peaty water. What if we see someone?’

‘What if we do?’ I said. ‘They’ll just have to make of it what they will.’

We had planned to drive on to London after our walk. But when we reached the car park Evie telephoned the pub, and asked if we could have our room back. When we arrived we had hot baths, and hot chocolate, and laughed at our adventure. The next day, just as we were leaving, Ariel called to say she had received a letter.

I love you.

There has not been one day when I have not thought of you.

I have been searching for you from the moment we were separated.

The fantasy evaporated, even before Ariel started to read to me. Her tone of voice had given it away. Ariel read words to the effect of:

I have been deeply shocked to receive this correspondence. I do not wish to hear anything else about this matter. Do not pass any information about me to your client. I am sorry she wants to know her family but I grew up without knowing my own father and I am certain your client can survive without knowing her ancestry. This really is the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me and I trust I will hear nothing more on this subject. All I will say is I was in Australia at the time, trying to avoid difficulties of my own.

Yours sincerely

And her name. Let us call her, for the sake of this history, Mrs Thomas. This letter is an approximation because the copyright belongs to Mrs Thomas. The piece of paper on which it was written is the property of Ariel because it was to her that the letter was addressed. The irony of not owning this communication, and of not being able accurately to share the story of my life, in order to protect the privacy of my birth mother, is not lost on me.

Ariel wrote again. She told Mrs Thomas that I already knew what information was publicly available about her, which included where she lived. She said that I had approached her through an intermediary out of consideration for her feelings. I was not searching for her out of idle curiosity but because I had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer, that I had undergone chemotherapy, bilateral mastectomies, reconstructive surgery and that I had a daughter. In order to make the best possible decision for my daughter’s future I would like a full medical history of the family. She also said that I sent Mrs Thomas my very best wishes, and I was irritated by this, because I did no such thing.

The reply came quickly. Mrs Thomas said that she felt terrified, and that there was nowhere where she felt safe. But she would tell us ‘what was required’. She then told how she had become engaged to
a wonderful man
just before going to Australia. She had hitchhiked down the length of the east coast picking up work where she could find it. She said that just before leaving Sydney she had had
a quickie
at a party with someone who belonged to a group of people she hung around with, although she claimed not to know his name. She said she didn’t know that she was pregnant until her mother realised her condition after her return to the United Kingdom. A flat was rented for her and she was shut away for the remainder of her pregnancy. She said she had given birth under anaesthetic and never saw the baby.
They told me later that it was a girl
. She talked about her husband, the man she said she had betrayed, who had been good enough never to mention
it
in all the long years of their marriage. She did, however, provide a thin medical history and I was happy to find, for Evie’s sake, that there had been few deaths through cancer, although several due to acute alcoholism. Mrs Thomas contradicted her first letter, in which she had stated that she did not know her father, by providing details of his and his parents’ medical history. Her paternal grandmother, for example, had had the only case of breast cancer in the family, and had survived it. She ended by saying that everyone had rights, even her, and that she wanted to be left alone.

I was struck by her lack of interest, of curiosity. She didn’t mention her children. She accepted no social or moral responsibility for her actions. She clearly didn’t believe that she had any. I did not believe that she did not know the name of my father. And yet, I felt for her. This woman was, technically, my mother. The tie that had been broken between us is generally regarded as the most powerful bond there is. Certainly, in relation to Evie, that is true. I tried to tell myself that it was not me that Mrs Thomas was rejecting, but a circumstance that had been traumatic for her. I was just an idea to her, and her experience had shaped the rest of her life. One of the two of us had to be the mother, and it clearly wasn’t going to be her. I drafted a reply:

Dear Mrs Thomas

My only regret, in approaching you through an intermediary, is that it allowed you to make the first words you said to me a passing reference to ‘it’. Had I written to you myself I doubt you would have done this. You say you want to be left alone and, also, that you are terrified. There is nothing here for you to fear. If you truly want to be left alone, then help me, by giving me what I seek.

In your letter you mention rights. I have no right to a relationship with you, or even to meeting you. But I believe I have a moral right to know who I am, and where I come from, and that you have an obligation to tell me what you know. Are we Scottish, English, Welsh or Irish? Norwegian? Sailors or publicans? Gypsies or priests? Are we dark, fair, tall or short? You know the answers to some, if not all, of these things. I invite you to share your story with me, not just the pitiful circumstances of your pregnancy. Let me see something of the fabric of who I am.

Yet this is only half the story. It seems improbable that you neither knew, nor subsequently discovered, the identity of my father. He will be an old man now – if, indeed, he is still alive – and I would like to know his name, the colour of his hair, his eyes, what he did for a living. Was he even Australian? Has it occurred to you that he might be happy to know he has a child? It need not involve you in any way.

To go to Australia, alone, in the 1960s, and to travel the length of the coast, was a brave and wonderful thing to do; you are not so retiring as you make out.

If you feel unable to help me, then there are other people able to answer most of my questions. Although it seems unlikely that you have told your children they have a half-sister.

I wish you well, and send you my best wishes

I wasn’t sure if the ‘best wishes’ were heartfelt or not this time, and I kept the letter, and fiddled with it, for several weeks. Mentioning her children was provocative, but I didn’t have much to work with. However you looked at it, I was begging, which was an invidious position to be in. I decided, in the end, not to send it. There didn’t seem to be any point. What could possibly be gained from approaching someone who so clearly wanted nothing to do with me? And anyway, I hadn’t been honest. What I wanted was to set eyes on a human being who was related to me by blood. Not just Evie. I wanted to meet my birth mother. I was curious about my half-brothers and I wanted to know the identity of my birth father. I wanted to extend the rope back into time and see the genetic tribe from whom I was descended. I wanted to blot out the loneliness. I decided to write to my half-brothers. But there was a problem. There were two boys that I knew of, Ioan and Robert. There were over seventy Robert Thomases in the county where their mother lived and almost as many Ioans. I downloaded the addresses of all of the Roberts from the electoral register. I wrote another letter:

Dear Robert

Forgive me for writing to you out of the blue.

I am researching my family history and have reason to believe that I am closely related to a Robert Thomas, born, I believe, in Caernarfon, and living at some time in Montgomery, Powys. I know the approximate age. I also know the names of other family members, so could easily work out if you are the right one. For my own part I was given up at birth, with the absolute minimum of information regarding my identity. It is my impression that other family members have not been made aware of my existence. I apologise, therefore, for the scattergun and potentially unsettling nature of my enquiry.

If I have got the wrong Robert Thomas (and there are many on the electoral register) then think no more of this, and thank you for your time in reading it. Otherwise, if you think you might be the right one, I would be delighted to hear from you.

With all best wishes

I didn’t send that either. If I sent the letter, or rather the seventy-five identical letters, to the seventy-five men in Powys who carried my half-brother’s name, and somehow found the right one, then Mrs Thomas would likely become my sworn enemy, whereas now she was simply adamant that she didn’t want to know me. Any chance I might have had of finding my natural father would be gone for good. And I felt a growing certainty that any good qual­ities that I might have inherited had not come from her. Other than a feisty spirit, for it was clear from her two existing letters that she was in possession of that. That, and the ability to string a sentence.

Every so often I took out my birth mother’s letters, or rather the photocopies that Ariel had given me, and looked at them. The more familiar they became, the less hurtful they appeared. I was all but incidental to them. But it was becoming less and less clear to me what I might gain from attempting to pursue a relationship with the woman who had written them. The only thing that was apparent was that hearing from me had distressed her.

If she had been prepared to meet me even a small part of the way, this story would have had a different ending. In her second letter she had said something about having made one mistake through ignor­ance, and not wanting to have to pay for it for the rest of her life. But she hadn’t made a mistake when she gave me up for adoption. She had done the best that was possible under the circumstances. Her mistake, it seemed to me, was to refuse the hand of friendship, now.

It was checkmate, or maybe it was check, but the next move wasn’t clear to me. I folded away the letters, the photocopies of hers and the drafts of the ones I hadn’t sent, and I put them in a file marked:
Mrs Thomas
. I put the file in a box in the attic that contained Rupert’s genealogy, researched by his late father, scroll after scroll of family trees, describing a meandering line that wandered back to a sea captain in the 1700s.

And then, just after Christmas, I decided to send the letter that I had drafted to Mrs Thomas. Her reply came quickly. She didn’t reveal the identity of my father, or tell me my nationality. Only that she had been ‘unimpressed’ by the sex, which she described as ‘a very brief incident’. She said that her maiden name was different from her father’s name, because her mother had remarried. She did not say what my grandfather’s name had been. She did say she’d had an illegitimate half-brother who her mother referred to as ‘a bastard in both senses of that word’. I wondered why she had chosen to include this, particular, turn of phrase.

I wrote to her again. I told her that I wanted to meet her. No one need know. I gave her my word. I would come to her. If she was unhappy, I would leave at once, and she need never see me again. I hoped with all my heart she could agree to this.

A month later she sent her reply. Certain phrases caught. This was ‘the worst kind of emotional bullying’. ‘You had parents.’ ‘You are not mine.’

I knelt down and retrieved the letter from where it had dropped from my open hand, and continued to read.

‘My mother said that we could live with her, but I was broke, and had no prospects. You were always going to be adopted.’ She didn’t mention that she was engaged to be married, and about to embrace the comfortable, middle-class life that her husband made available to her, and which sustains her to this day. I was aware that I had hit her as hard as she hit me. I laughed, dryly, at this family resemblance – not grace, or courage, or wit, or humour – but a sheer bloody-minded determination. Her desire to bury the truth of my existence was exactly mirrored by my own desire, my deepest wish, that she acknowledge it.