Violets, page 11
Pretty, Violet thought. Bit of a waste.
Sister Cathy was her name. She led them down the hallway and stopped at a door, said they could ask her any questions that came to mind.
Sounds from the other side.
Fred had stepped back, the nun stood to his right.
He smiled as if willing Violet to move, go ahead. They had discussed it that morning, sitting up in bed. She should be the one to choose, he said.
But Father McBride had a boy in mind, she thought. Fred had taken her hand, squeezed it so that she looked him in the eyes.
But Vi. If it isn’t right, it isn’t right.
She’d nodded but felt the panic rise, shook her head.
How could she tell anything at first sight?
42
Violet had got up and gone to work like any normal day.
Bacon, eggs, two slices of white bread. Then Mass. Then various chores, then Father John had gone out.
He had eaten his lunch quickly, tiptoed about, even rinsed his own plate.
She was to wait there, Sister Cathy said. Someone would come and get her if the visit had gone well.
It was half past twelve, then two o’clock.
There were just a few shirts to be washed, some collars to be scrubbed.
Violet left them to soak, smoked a cigarette.
43
The door opened onto a quiet room, muted light. Sister Cathy went over to raise the blinds.
They nap from one until three, she said.
There were four iron cots in a row on her right.
In one of them, two babies slept at either end.
Are they twins? Violet asked.
The nun shook her head. Not by birth, but they’d arrived together and were inseparable, she said.
They continued along. Violet was trying to be discreet, not wanting to look. She couldn’t think of any more questions to ask. The nun stood with her hands behind her back.
It was no good. She looked over her shoulder to find Fred.
As she turned, she saw, almost behind the door, an old pram. The hood was missing and the handle was crooked.
It was huge and deep like a boat. A child stood wobbling in it.
The nun nodded, gestured for her to proceed.
Violet smiled. The child mouthed sounds and squealed.
Violet beckoned for Fred to come in.
Look.
The child’s head was a mess of golden curls.
This one, Violet said, is it a boy or a girl?
44
It was ten to four. Violet sat at the table with her jacket folded ready on her lap.
Perhaps no one was coming. Perhaps that was that.
Her bag was on the chair. She pulled out a large brown envelope. In it were cuttings, tokens, dockets. Deck A, Berth 4. Dining chits and a ticket for the train from York. Photographs, one of the nurses laughing on the ship. Letters on airmail paper, a translucent, pearlised shell. A banknote, a hymn sheet. A ribbon whose provenance she did not recall.
Violet looked at the fragments all spread out.
It was all she had to give him.
It was all she had of him to keep.
She scooped everything back in, put the envelope into her bag, walked to the dresser, folded a tea towel, came back.
She looked out of the window.
Sister Cathy was walking up the path.
45
Father McBride stood up, shook Fred’s hand. Violet sat down.
He had all the papers here, he said.
Violet took the form he passed across. The child’s name was written at the top.
Was it Welsh?
Yes.
I see.
Violet had the urge to say it out loud, wanted to feel the shape of it in her mouth. It was the name he would have been called for nine months. Every day, he would have heard its sounds, looked up in response.
She had never been to Wales.
The priest watched, seemed to understand.
Parents often change the name, he said, for one they have chosen themselves.
He leaned over and indicated the line below.
You may insert the new one here. In brackets, for now.
46
Violet followed Sister Cathy up the path. It felt for a moment like she might take her hand.
The Mother Superior was sitting at her desk.
The visit had gone well, she said.
She described the people they had found. A good Catholic couple, unable to have children of their own. Hard-working husband, respectable wife. Excellent report from the Department of Health.
The nun looked straight into her eyes, said again:
Violet. Don’t you think it’s time?
She slid a form across the desk. On one condition, Violet said, and picked up the pen.
I, the undersigned …
She wrote her name.
Being
(b) the mother of the infant
She crossed out all the other lines, ran her finger along the page.
Hereby state that I understand the nature of the adoption order for which this application is made. And that in particular I understand that the effect of the order will be
She closed her eyes, opened them again.
permanently to deprive me of my parental rights.
Violet ran her finger down the page to the last line. Then she shook her head back and signed.
47
Fred took Violet’s hand in his.
The priest came back in. He was a little red in the face. He placed the file back on the desk.
May I ask your age, Mrs Hall?
Twenty-three.
Ah.
Violet blinked.
I’m afraid we cannot proceed after all.
Violet felt her throat constrict. Her cheeks were hot. Fred stood up.
The priest went stuttering on. Violet listened with her head tilted to one side. By law, he said, each spouse must be over twenty-five.
There was a pause.
I see, Violet said. Then what would you advise, Father?
Fred was stricken, his mouth was open but no words were coming out.
You could wait, the priest said. Or go ahead in the father’s name alone.
Violet kept her hands folded in her lap.
The priest was saying what they already knew. There would be other babies, another boy, in a year or two.
Yes, Violet thought. There would be endless boys, for all time. She could almost feel them in the room, sticky-pawed, crowding round.
Fred sat down, seemed to slump almost. Violet cleared her throat, looked for him to speak. The priest shuffled the forms, offered apologies for the mistake.
Then Violet felt it spread like a rash across her face; in the muscles of her jaw tightening, in her spine straightening.
How foolish she had been. Now finally it came.
Shame.
Shame that he was not her own.
So many times she had planned how to explain it to everyone else. How she would say, casually but with pride, that he had been raised a Catholic from the start. That he came from a good home. That the mother, poor girl, had done the best by him she could.
After all, she would say, it happened a lot.
And she had sewn and patched and saved every last scrap of herself for him. Darning, stitching, mending everything against its will, trying to fill everything back up. Ready for who? A boy born to someone else then handed down, nearly new.
Would she ever be enough?
Violet looked up. The priest was busying himself with the papers on his desk.
She turned to Fred. He met her eyes with an expression she hadn’t seen before. Perhaps, she thought, it was something she hadn’t seen back then, after he carried her down the stairs in the dark, her sopping nightdress sticking to her skin.
He looked distraught, defeated, like he might finally give in.
No.
There was only this one. This boy, bouncing in the pram.
Violet shook her head.
It doesn’t matter, she said.
The boy was meant for them.
48
Violet waited in the nun’s office alone. She thought of the boy, imagined him there with her now, straining to get down out of her lap, hands grabbing at the desk, knocking over the pencil pot; the letter opener spinning to a stop and pencil shavings spilled, sticking like frills to his fingers and toes.
Down the hall, at the front of the house, Violet knew how it would go. Papers taken in and out of envelopes; hands shaken, shaken again; another signature, a donation gratefully received; a drawer unlocked, opened and shut.
Yet nothing else had changed. The statue of the Virgin Mary still stood beside the desk. And the painting of Saul kneeling in the dust, his horse rearing up.
It was then that Violet felt the crushing weight, and bowed her head.
She waited for a sign.
No. There was nothing left to say.
For the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
49
The papers were gathered up, copies torn off.
Adoption Order in Respect of an Infant.
Fred had crossed out every ‘We’ and written ‘I’ instead.
The priest added a note to the side.
Wife to make application when she is twenty-five.
Father McBride looked flushed.
There is one more thing, Mrs Hall.
Violet caught her breath.
The natural mother of the child, she has asked to meet you, the mother, before …
He trailed off, started again.
In order to be reassured, you see? It’s rather unconventional, but we feel on this occasion, given that the boy has been with us for quite a while …
Violet let her shoulders drop, nodded, relieved. The priest too breathed out, pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow.
Then I am delighted to say that you may take him home with you today.
Fred stood up, loosened his limbs.
Thank you, Father.
He leaned over to shake his hand.
Violet coughed. One more thing, Father, may I ask?
The priest looked askance, wary again.
The boy’s mother. Am I permitted to know her name?
50
The cots stood vacant and the old pram in the corner was still. All was order, all was clean.
She sat with you on the rug. She pulled you up by your hands, you wobbled, stood. You looked away, wanting her to hide her face.
Peepo!
Gone.
You held out your arms to be picked up.
You put your head on her shoulder. You put your thumb in your mouth.
Remember?
Cast your mind back, beyond the prefabricated shack of what you know. Long ago, it was. Blank slate you were, mind-slow. Aglow instead with light and moving shapes, bathed in the rose-tint of afternoon stone, sweat smells and talc, fig-split, your Mama’s mouth and cherries, pips spat out. Remember in the chapel where she held you out? And the Virgin Mary looked down with a smile that it was difficult to place, as the water trickled over your face.
Then you were carried, home. Tipped out on the tarmac like a stone, hardened off in the crisp cold of the cabbage patch.
And then the search began. How you searched, found little; searched again, found more. All those letters to institutions domestic and overseas, searching like a boy-cub blindly nosing for its mother’s teat. Searching in secret, there a sign, there a trace. A stamp, a form, a phrase, a crossing-out.
And you found that you were carried there and back. Birthed and spit-dabbed, suckled, warmed and cooled. Calmed through colic, blessed, baptised, clasped tight or yielded, wrapped.
Yes.
Clapped and giddied, little piggied all the way home. Smiled at, howling, powder-puffed. Held aloft, stroked and kissed, oh! Pram Boy, kissed at corner and crease; brushed lightly against her cheek.
And when you grew up and found her, she knew. When she saw you for the first time, standing on her doorstep, her first thought was that you bore some resemblance to her eldest son. The one she had after you.
And there, you began; sat for cups of tea, asked questions; told her things you had learned that she did not know.
You sent her files to check and checked your facts.
It took her back.
Looking at you, she remembered him. His delicate hands, the sewing machine. His head bent forward, hair parted on the side. She remembered how she held her breath their first time, down in the furrows of the wooded earth. And then, later, alone, the pill-throw.
She gave you cuttings crumpled, papers stamped, dockets clocked to deck and berth. A single, bright blond curl.
For her, she kept the memory of being at bow and stern, and the slow light of the Mediterranean coming round. And the heft of her pregnant body moving through the sounds and stench, and finally, her sun-stroked shoulders and the burn, the dazzling beauty of the water they were in. The downy softness of her lover’s skin.
All along she knew you, while you knew her not.
And she was game, when you took your teenage daughters out to meet her and they played at guessing whose was what (a stubborn streak, her cheekbones, curls, her height). And she held her hand out palm to palm, laughed, took off her shoes, compared her feet.
Yes. She remembered that the light was warm and low that day. The cots stood vacant; the pram was still.
She remembered the slow blink of your eyes and the gentle motion of your mouth.
You put your hand to her face. You spread your fingers against her cheek, resettled yourself on her hip.
She remembered the weight and warmth of your head on her shoulder.
She remembered the open palm of your hand.
She remembered your fingers, she remembered your face.
She whispered into your ear.
And she kissed your face.
And she kissed your face and said (knowing that the woman she had met would take her place):
Yes.
I
will
see
you
again
my
son.
51
Before your mother died, she thought that he was there and calling her to come, your father; flung back her arm to feel the empty cool of his side of the bed, dreamt of him, knew he was there, she said.
And knew what age the twins would then have been. And recalled the pail of thin red blood.
She had been carried, she said, as if through a flood.
Then waiting for him to come home from the war, then starting over again.
And your curls. And your bowed legs that she attributed not to rickets as was likely, but the way you bounced in the bottomless pram with its deep curved bed.
And she told the joke about the playpen and the cot and the story, a little later on, about the baby girl they brought home next. Except you saw her off; she did not take. And anyway, she said, my nerves were frayed.
Before your mother died, you showed her what you had gleaned from years of research. An archive of the circumstances of your birth. And she added to your files all that she had: black-and-white and pink and green the forms, the letter-headed papers, gothic font. You saw their applications for consent, the margins full of pencil-scrawls and notes:
Child born in Italy
Army Cert produced
Wife to make application when she is twenty-five.
And yet, when your mother died she had outlived them all, waiting until last to claim her time. She missed the feel of the piano keys and yes, envied the ease of others’ lives. She knew what age the twins would then have been, recalled the blood, the pail, the joke about the playpen and the cot; recalled which child was born to whom, outside of wedlock.
But Pram Boy, do you know why, when your mother died, she waited until you left her hospital bed?
No goodbye, that way, not again.
For your mothers did not leave you; you were kept.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my father for trusting me to make something wildly imagined and new. And to my whole family. Thank you to Emma Paterson for seeing something there and calling it a novel, to Monica MacSwan and Max Porter. Thanks to all at Granta, in particular Anne Meadows, Rowan Cope, Jason Arthur, Jenny Page, Christine Lo, Patty Rennie and Lamorna Elmer. Thanks to friends who have advised, encouraged and inspired: Helen Ward and Oli Evans, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, Miranda Collinge, Vic Kitchingman, Georgia Rutherford. Special thanks to Jo Kociejowski and Liz Timperley-Preece for reading with honesty and openness. Thanks also and as ever to Katie Natanel for reading, listening and sharing with acuity and insight. Thank you to Margot, Stanley, Gloria and Ruth, who are all here. And to Matthew, always and for everything and for notes on every draft. Thank you to both our mothers for their encouragement and support. Finally, thank you to Eileen and Eileen for bold lives lived.
Copyright
Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2022
Copyright © Alexandra Hyde, 2022
Alexandra Hyde has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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