Veronica
LOCKET ISLAND
“Oh! Oh, Veronica!”
Jolted by Terry’s wailing, Patrick the Penguin slithers toward the floor. He lands elegantly on his feet and starts waddling about, sticking his beak into things.
“How could you bear it?” asks Terry. “To have your own baby taken away like that?”
How do you bear anything?
“I had no choice,” I reply. “The nuns said it was for the best. They believed they were doing the right thing. In their eyes, the fact that the visiting couple desperately wanted a child was a God-given opportunity. They had been wondering what to do about us, anyway—they couldn’t look after us forever, and I just wasn’t in a position to care for a baby on my own. I had no money, no job, no husband, no prospects. My son had gone to a good, Christian family, they assured me, and he would have a much, much better life than he could ever have with me, a disgraced teenager. They may have been right, for all I know. In those days, everything was very different. More different than you can possibly imagine.”
Terry has no idea what it meant in the forties for a girl to have a baby when she didn’t have a husband. Your life was ruined on every level. The shame attached itself to you, and you could never shake it off. It became a part of you, like leprosy. People wouldn’t want to touch you. They would cross over the road rather than have to speak to you.
“But those nuns tricked you!” she cries indignantly.
“Because they knew I’d never, never—not even if it killed me—let my baby go otherwise.”
I am conscious of my locket hanging heavy against my skin. In the caverns deep inside me, something is struggling like molten lava trying to find a way out.
Terry listens, appalled, as I outline my life after Enzo was taken away. How I managed to break loose from the convent and stumble on with life, getting a job in a local bank, working my way up. How I silently grieved for years on end. I kept my past well hidden. Nobody had any inkling about what had happened to me. I shunned any contact with the people I’d known before or during the war. I never set eyes on Aunt Margaret again.
I tried so many times over the years to locate my son, but adoption legislation in those days made it impossible for a birth mother to trace her child. Besides, Enzo’s new parents had changed his name and made an agreement with the nuns to keep their own identities hidden. I believe money was involved, but in any case, the nuns absolutely refused to share the information with me. Even when I applied to the same convent ten years later, they claimed to have lost the details of the family he’d gone to. I treasured the hope that Enzo himself, once he’d grown up, might eventually find a way to contact me, but that never happened. My twin hope was that Giovanni would return for me one day. If he was still alive and still loved me, surely he would come and find me? As a married couple, our chances of locating Enzo would be much stronger. But the years passed, and both hopes, starved of information, withered and died.
Yet pallor and skinniness seemed to suit me just as much as rosy-cheeked enthusiasm had done. I attracted a great deal of male attention. I recoiled from it all. I gained nothing except the reputation of being a cold fish.
There was, however, one man who didn’t give up. A proud conqueror of many women, he set his sights on me the very first moment he saw me. It was obvious from his whole demeanor when he walked into the bank that day, and he found excuses to come back and flirt every day subsequently. Never in all my years at the bank had I seen so many pointless financial transactions.
“Hugh Gilford-Chart was a charming, forceful, good-looking man,” I tell Terry. “He was powerful in more ways than one, a well-known property magnate. And he flattered my vanity. He didn’t give two figs about my brusque manner and constant refusals. He actually seemed to like them. Anyway, he showered me with compliments. And compliments are always nice.” I wasn’t immune. To have a man so interested in me despite my disregard for his feelings was undeniably gratifying. It had been twelve years since I’d seen Giovanni by then. I knew that he was never going to come back for me.
I wasn’t in love with Hugh, but I was drawn to him. When he proposed to me along with champagne, diamonds and the offer of an immediate trip to a swanky hotel in Paris—well, it wasn’t difficult to decide. I accepted. I certainly didn’t expect a perfect marriage, but I appreciated the security he offered.
He improved my life in countless practical ways. I acquired a plush lifestyle, a number of household staff, holidays in exotic places. I took an interest in my husband’s work, as well. I managed to educate myself, reading about money, investments and properties. Seeing that I had a shrewd business acumen, my husband put me in charge of the rural side of his company. My chief role was buying country cottages and letting them out to tenants.
Unfortunately, my husband loved all the ladies, not just me. A year into the marriage he had his first affair. I knew about it at once. He was slovenly about covering up his tracks, and she left lipstick stains and lacy suspenders all over the place. She was his secretary. It was such a cliché. I was sickened by it, although not wholly surprised. After he’d tired of the secretary, my husband’s affairs were as numerous as wood lice in a rotten log. I became fed up with it, and eventually, after eight years of tolerating his lies and infidelity, I filed for a divorce. With my experience at the bank, I knew every last detail of his financial affairs and I did well out of it. I was able to keep on many of the rural properties.
“I have since sold most of them. That’s how I came by my millions,” I inform Terry. “I’ve invested money wisely over the years, and I spend very little on myself.” I classify it as little, anyway. Although I spend far more than, say, Eileen. Or Terry.
“I was never tempted to marry again.”
Terry’s eyes are two clear pools, brimming with sympathy. “I can’t say I blame you.”
“Years later I did receive some news of my son. A cousin of the adoptive family tracked me down. But it was only to inform me of his death.”
I remember the day so well. Checking the post and getting that three-page letter that summarized Enzo’s life, or the life of Joe Fuller as he had now become. Learning that he had died in a tragic mountaineering accident and there was now no possibility of ever getting to know him.
Terry is blotting her eyes with the end of her sleeve. “My heart just goes out to you. You’ve been through so much! But you—you never cry, Veronica.”
“No.”
It’s quite true. I have not shed a single tear since the day Aunt Margaret told me crying was a weak thing to do. I didn’t want to be weak. I still don’t want to be weak. I have always despised weakness.
“But never to cry! I would have thought it’s impossible. How do you manage it?” Terry asks with a loud sniff.
“Years of practice,” I tell her. “Years and years.”
I resume. “The letter informed me that Enzo had no children of his own, and I had no reason to doubt it. But it recently occurred to me that an adoptive cousin might not have known this with absolute certainty. I took it upon myself to double-check. And that’s how I discovered my grandson, Patrick.”
The other Patrick stops in his tracks and turns to look up at me again, recognizing his name. I reach out my hand to him. He sidles up and rubs his head against my fingers. I am glad of the touch, glad of the small, spiky beak and tousled baby fluff.
“You must have been so thrilled to discover a grandson, after all this time,” Terry exclaims, determined to find a ray of light at the end of my tale of woe. She wants so much to believe my grandson and I are in happy-ever-after land.
I don’t respond to her comment. An odd clamminess is coiling under the surface of my skin. It chills me like a winter mist.
I need to be alone.
Patrick the Penguin is sleeping peacefully. One foot is lifted slightly and propped against the side of the suitcase. His chest rises and falls with each breath, a gentle penguiny snore gurgling in his slightly open beak.
I straighten slowly. Everything has changed. The past has resurfaced. Memories of my father, of my mother, of Giovanni and of my precious baby Enzo burgeon painfully in my consciousness. My baby boy, whom I never found again, who was taken away before he learned to say “Mum,” who died before he even knew I wanted him.
How I ache for them, for what could have been. Each of them snatched away from me too, too soon. I feel as if I am being strangled from the inside.
This room is much too small. It is claustrophobic. Oppressive.
Not far away there’s a vast community of Adélies waiting for me under endless fathoms of polar sky. The penguins can help; I am sure of it. They have a brand of ancient wisdom that transcends the confused strivings of the human race. I need to get out and be with them. Just me, Veronica McCreedy, and the elements and five thousand penguins. Nobody else.
Dietrich is in the computer room. I can hear Terry and Mike talking in the kitchen. I silently struggle into my jacket and mukluks. I grab my cane. I can’t be bothered with a handbag this time. Treading with utmost softness, I sneak out.
A chilly wind whips fragments of snow up into my face. I walk as fast as I can to put space between myself and the field base. I don’t look back. My breath is short. Puffs of steam rise on the frozen air. I force myself on, up the slope, leaning heavily on my cane with every pace.
My face is numb. It is colder than I have ever felt it before. The sky is low, simmering with murky patterns. The wind becomes fiercer and fiercer as I go on. It batters against me, whistling around my ears. But I’m driven by an inner force that’s equally fierce. I just need to see the penguins, to be alone at last with the penguins. I put one step in front of another. Again and again and again. Somehow, in spite of my protesting lungs, I arrive at the top of the slope.
And there they are, laid out before me, a huge, undulating mass of life, a black-and-white realm of mothers, fathers, couples and babies.
I descend and walk among them in the dusky flurries of snow. Some lift their heads to look at me, but mostly they carry on attending their own business. Sheltering together, feeding together, arguing together, sleeping together.
That is it, I realize. That’s the thing that gives their life purpose. That “together” that has been so lacking in my own life. All that I possess is encased in silver and hanging on the end of a chain, under my thermals, pressed against my skin. Four strands of hair.
A hurricane of grief sweeps through me. And suddenly I’m wailing with the wind and spouting hot tears of sorrow. They burst out of my depths in a violent, gushing torrent. I never dreamed I had so many tears stored up inside.
It has become hard to breathe. Inside my rib cage something strange is happening. There’s coldness like a huge mountain of ice beginning to shift. Then, without warning, the inner block cracks and splits right across the center. Pain scythes through me. I let out a sharp cry. The pain gathers momentum and will not stop. I feel the ice shatter into a thousand needlelike shards. Wrenching my body apart.
I crumple onto the ground.