On the first Sunday in October the still air was imbued with pure golden light. The children eyed with yearning the piles of fallen leaves on the route to church, but dressed in their best they dared not kick them and risk their mother’s ire. During the afternoon the aunts, Edith’s two younger sisters, arrived, Aunt Muriel like a gust of warm air, Aunt Bess more of a gentle zephyr.
As she ushered them inside, Edith glanced out with distaste at the departing cart. ‘Couldn’t you have asked Bill’s brother to drop you at the corner?’
‘Oh, don’t be so uppity, Edie,’ Muriel said cheerfully.
Irene was often shocked by the way the sisters spoke. She loved Muriel, the middle sister, best, rosy-cheeked, plump and bosomy, her dishwater-blonde curls fringing a felt hat shaped like a pudding basin. When she spread her arms to embrace the children a comforting earthy smell rose from her warm body.
‘A hug for your auntie,’ she crooned and while Clayton wriggled away from her wet smacking kisses, Irene allowed herself to be pressed into her soft, corseted warmth. She was careful to avoid being pricked by one of the needles Muriel kept pinned in her bosom, for her aunt was always mending something. She had three adolescent boys and there was always a seat to be sewn into a pair of trousers or a loose button to secure. Like Edith, she’d escaped from their father and the farm cottage as soon as she could, in her case by marrying young. She’d met Bill on her first day at the village school. He was working on the railway today and Bill’s brother had fetched Aunt Bess.
‘Hello, my darlings.’ Bess, the youngest sister, had a small high voice from which all colour had been drawn. Her woollen dress of pale blue was careworn, but the simple straw hat suited her little pale face with its fragile features and mild hazel eyes.
Bess was always spoken of as the beauty of the family, but her looks had been no use, for she was such a gentle soul that she’d been bullied into keeping house for their father after her sisters left home. Her delicate prettiness had faded as the years went by.
Edith herded everybody into the sitting room and, it being Maudie’s day off, mustered Irene to push in the tea trolley, while she followed behind bearing Philip’s mother’s Victorian cake stand. She often used the blackberry china when her sisters visited, and it was always the sitting room and never the parlour. Muriel made a point of pointing out such things.
‘Not good enough for the rosebuds today, are we?’ Muriel said this time with a wicked smile and a nudge of Bess’s ribs. Muriel didn’t really mind about the cups, but Edith did.
‘You said last time you liked the blackberry pattern best,’ she said, glaring at her sister as she laid cups and saucers out on the low table in front of the sofa.
‘I do, but the other’s got decent-sized handles yer can get yer mitts round properly. Isn’t that right, Bess?’
’A cup’s a cup,’ peace-loving Bess said. ‘As long as it has hot tea in it I’m not bothered.’
Muriel caught sight of Clayton loitering by the door with an eye on the cakes. ‘Come on in, boy, let’s have a proper look at you.’ Clayton shuffled forward and stood before her.
‘Hands.’ He obliged his mother and whipped them out of his trouser pockets.
‘How yer getting on at that swanky school of yours?’
‘S’all right,’ he told his aunt and helped himself without being asked to a slice of sugar-topped sponge. ‘I’m going to boarding school when I’m nine,’ he announced, before he bit into it.
‘Irene, pass round that cake before your brother has it all. No, dear, tea plates first.’
‘Boarding school, is it? That sounds la-di-da.’
‘Philip thinks it’s important,’ Edith said, thin-lipped as she poured the tea.
‘Where is he today?’
‘Choir practice.’
Irene’s father did not feel comfortable with Edith’s sisters and usually made sure he was out when they came.
‘Ooh, serviettes. This is proper, innit, Bess?’
Bess crumbled her slice of sponge and licked the jam off one of the pieces with the tip of her small tongue. ‘It’s very moist,’ she said thoughtfully.
Edith smiled at her without warmth as she handed round cups of tea.
‘Clayton’s different this year,’ Muriel announced. ‘You’ve grown, boy. Who does he look like, Bess? A bit like our pa, I reckon.’
Edith’s face suffused with colour at the idea of her precious son having any connection with their father. ‘He certainly does not. He favours Philip’s side of the family, don’t you, Clayton? Wait a moment and I’ll show you.’ She passed Muriel the sugar bowl then left the room. A moment later she returned carrying a photograph album Irene hadn’t seen before.
‘Here we are.’ She opened the album and spread it across Muriel’s lap. ‘This is Philip’s mother. And here’s Philip at Clayton’s age. You see the likeness?’
Irene leaned against the back of the sofa to see. Muriel brushed crumbs off her bosom and examined the oval-framed portraits.
‘She’s right, look, Bess. Very like Philip’s father.’
‘Move up, will you,’ Edith said. The three sisters sat squashed together and leafed through the album, murmuring at the faces of stiff hirsute gentlemen in high-necked collars, pudgy women in feathery bonnets and tiny tots frothing with lace. Some photographs were labelled, but many were not.
‘Clayton’s face is definitely Burns,’ Bess put in, ‘but the shape of his hands is Pa’s and he walks like Pa, too, don’t he, Muriel?’
‘After Pa’s had a drink,’ Muriel roared, elbowing Edith in the ribs.
‘Really, Muriel,’ Edith said. ‘Not in front of the children.’
Irene was still staring hopefully over Aunt Muriel’s shoulder at the photographs. Perhaps her real parents, the dead cousins, were in the album somewhere among all these unknown faces.
She became aware that Clayton, still loitering by the cake stand, was regarding her with a cunning expression.
‘I wonder who Irene looks like?’ he said through a mouthful of sponge.
As one all three sisters craned round to stare at her in a silent tableau.
‘Nobody,’ Clayton sneered, deepening the horror. ‘She looks like nobody.’
‘I must be like Daddy,’ she stumbled, ‘because of his cousins.’
‘Which cousins? Can we see the cousins?’
‘That’s enough, Clayton.’ His mother shut the album with a force that made the spine creak and slid it onto the dining table, out of reach.
‘She looks like herself, don’t you, lovey?’ Aunt Muriel turned and smiled at Irene, an over-bright smile, Irene thought. Clayton selected a cucumber sandwich, a smug expression in his eyes.
Irene stared hard at the flower pattern on the sofa and bit her lip against threatening tears.
‘Here.’ Aunt Bess was fumbling with a small round tin. ‘How about a sugared almond?’ Irene took one and the sweet nuttiness in her mouth was calming.
The moment after the aunts left through the front door, Irene’s father returned through the back. Irene made fresh tea and kept him company as he helped himself to the remains of cake and sandwiches at the dining table.
‘Had you been waiting round the corner for them to go, Daddy?’
‘Of course not.’ But his eyes twinkled behind his glasses. ‘Were they on good form today?’
‘They were,’ she said, failing to suppress a smile. ‘Aunt Muriel got annoyed because Mummy doesn’t visit Grandpa, and Mummy said Grandpa’s house was disgusting and who would want to go there, and then Aunt Bess cried, because it’s her who cleans the house.’
‘It sounds as though I was better out of the way.’
‘I think so.’
She was aware of the photograph album still lying there. In the upset Edith had forgotten to put it away. Irene rubbed her hands on her lap in case they were sticky, then pulled it towards her and began to turn the pages.
‘Who fetched that out?’
‘Mummy did. Are any of these people my real mummy and daddy? Will you show me?’
Her father reached over and closed the book and eased it from her. ‘No,’ he said, his face kind but guarded. ‘We are your real mummy and daddy. Irene, my dear, there isn’t anyone else.’
She didn’t understand.
‘What about your cousins? The ones who died?’ Her fingernails dug into her palms, but though he did not speak, her father’s strained face told her what she’d already guessed. There had been no cousins.
He pushed his plate away, his cake half-eaten, and wiped his fingers on his napkin.
‘Irene, we chose you, your mother and I. Out of all the babies in the world we picked you out to be ours. Isn’t that enough?’
She nodded, but inside a voice was crying no. They may have chosen her, but she felt she’d disappointed them.
*
That night Irene dreamed she was lying in a cot in a dimly lit room, crying babies in other cots all around. Shadowy figures moved between them. A pretty woman with a veiled face peered down at her. Irene tried to move, to reach up to her, but her limbs would not do her bidding. It was as though they were pinned to her sides. The woman withdrew and melted into the shadows. ‘Come back. Choose me,’ Irene tried to call but the words would not leave her lips and she woke in the darkness of her bedroom with a thudding heart. Never had she felt so desolate.
Where had she come from? she wondered. Where did she belong?