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The weekend crawled by at an agonizingly slow pace. Mr. Champion, according to his housekeeper, was away for the weekend, visiting his sister, whose health was even more precarious than his own. The promised visit to Terry Chapman in jail could not take place without advance arrangements, and such arrangements would take at least two working days. Most importantly, the registrar’s office in Dorking would not open until 9:00 on Monday morning.
Much as he would like to, he decided that he should not go back to Rose Hill and see Carol. His heart still fluttered at the thought of her. He still imagined how it would be if she would agree to go with him to Rhodesia, but he couldn’t bring himself to visit her. He had questions that he was not ready to ask, or maybe he didn’t want to hear the answers.
Carol was Vera’s friend. They had been close. They had been in the Land Army together, posted to the same farm for at least some of the time. Why had Carol said nothing about Vera giving birth in Dorking; in a completely different county? He’d given her every opportunity to tell him what she knew, but she had said nothing and left him to continue his wild goose chase looking for proof of a birth in Brighton. Perhaps she didn’t know about Dorking. Perhaps she had been moved to a different farm long before the baby was born and knew nothing about the birth.
On Monday morning he drove north across the Downs as the winter sun was rising in a cold blue sky. February would soon give way to March, and the promise of spring was in the noisy cloud of seagulls following a farm tractor as it ploughed a hillside field. The gulls dipped and whirled, screeching in triumph as the plough turned the rich earth, exposing hibernating insects. He topped a rise in the Downs and saw the town of Dorking nestled into a protective fold and bustling with traffic. Before long he was enmeshed in a traffic jam, crawling along behind a string of lorries and looking for a place to park.
The registrar’s office was an ocean of quiet after the chaos of the crowded streets. It would be peaceful like this in Africa, he told himself. How much traffic could there be in Bulawayo? He would have a driver to ferry him along the dusty roads and someone to bring him a cup of tea when he arrived in his office. And Carol would be ... He reined in his wandering thoughts; for once, the daydream was not giving him any pleasure.
The registrar’s waiting room was wood paneled with a frosted glass door leading into the office of the registrar himself. The office staff moved at the pace of all civil servants, polite and unhurried.
Having made it clear that he, himself, was not a new father and did not wish to register a birth, he was at last admitted into the inner sanctum.
The registrar, a cheery little man with a round face and a bald head that appeared to have been newly polished to a fresh shine, flipped the heavy pages of the register.
“Here it is,” he said at length. “Birth took place at Smallfield Farm, attended by Doctor ...” He hesitated, staring through reading glasses as round as his face. “I don’t recognize the name.” He turned the ledger so that Toby could read the notations. “That’s a puzzler. What name do you make it out to be?”
Toby, also peering through spectacles, studied the elegant calligraphy. “Smethers? Could it be Smethers?”
“Smethers,” the registrar repeated. “I don’t know any Doctor Smethers.”
Suddenly the little man slapped his own forehead so hard that the reading glasses jiggled down to the end of his nose. He pushed them back impatiently. “Smethers. Yes, of course. I heard about this.”
He looked at Toby, and it seemed that his bald head actually glowed. “I wasn’t here in the war,” he said. “You know how it was. We all had to do our bit. Signal Corps. Saw a spot of action in Normandy.”
Toby knew that he was expected to respond with his own war credentials, but for once, he felt no guilt and no need to explain himself. He was far too anxious to find out what was so special about the birth of Anita Mary Malloy and the involvement of Dr. Smethers.
“What did you hear?” Toby asked impatiently.
“Smethers isn’t a doctor,” said the registrar. “Or at least, not a doctor in the way you would think of a doctor. He’s a vet.”
“A vet?”
“A veterinary surgeon; you know, dogs, cats, cows, that sort of thing.”
“This child was delivered by a veterinary surgeon?”
The registrar smiled. “That’s what happened. The mother was a land girl, and from what I understand, she never told the farmer about being in the family way. Came as a surprise to everyone.”
Toby tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Vera Chapman, who had announced her pregnancy to the world in order to force a marriage to the baby’s father, had returned to the farm and said nothing to the farmer. Why?
“Would I be able to speak to Dr. Smethers?” Toby asked. “Do you know where he is?”
The registrar bounced out enthusiastically from behind his desk. “I’ll ask the young ladies in the office,” he said. “They’ll know more than I do. I think one of them has a dog or a cat or something like that. Don’t have any pets myself. Just wait here. I’ll find out for you.”
Toby waited impatiently while the registrar trotted across the hall and through a frosted glass door marked “Typing Pool.” He was back within moments.
“I was wrong about dogs and cats,” he said.
“He’s not a vet.”
“Oh yes, he’s a vet. I was wrong about the girl in the office. She has a parrot. Could have sworn it was a dog or a cat. Fluff, I’m sure she said its name was Fluff; never heard of a parrot called Fluff. They’re not even fluffy, are they?”
Toby suppressed an urge to shake the information out of the little man. “The vet?”
“Yes, yes. Mostly cows and pigs, but he’s retired now.”
“So where do I find him?”
The registrar smiled, his cheeks glowing as red as his bald head. “Mr. Whitby, this is your lucky day.”
It doesn’t feel lucky, Toby thought.
“Agricultural Advisory Committee,” the registrar said. “They’re meeting today and Dr. Smethers is on the Committee. I sent one of the young ladies to fetch him out of his meeting.”
“Well, thank you.”
“Happy to do it. I rather wanted to hear the story myself. Can’t imagine such a thing. Big difference between delivering a baby and delivering a calf.”
“Yes, I suppose there is,” Toby agreed. He had never seen the birth of a calf, and most certainly had never seen the birth of a baby, so he had only the haziest notion of what would transpire in either case. He felt himself blushing as he tried to form a mental picture. When he was a child, his cat had given birth to kittens. His mother, of course, had hurried him from the room as soon as the process had begun.
He tried to force the flush from his cheeks by taking several steadying breaths. He would do better in Africa. It would be different there. Women gave birth in the fields; that’s what he’d heard. Gave birth in the fields like it was nothing at all and went right back to work. It was ridiculous that he was more than thirty years old and he knew nothing about the processes of life. He had seen death, but he had never seen birth. He knew how babies were made, but he had never made one. He had never even seen a naked woman, except for a brief glimpse at a cabaret show in London, interrupted by an air raid. The memory did nothing to calm him.
He was relieved when the door opened to admit a gray-haired man with the stooping shoulders of a man who had once been tall but was now the victim of age and infirmity.
“Smethers,” said the man.
“Toby Whitby.”
“So, why do you want to know about the birth up at Smallfields?”
“Some questions have been raised,” Toby said.
The vet picked up the ledger and looked at the entry. “What kind of questions?”
“I can’t really say. My clients are entitled to their privacy.”
“No privacy giving birth in a barn,” said Smethers. “Don’t know why the poor girl left it so late. She shouldn’t have been on the farm at all. It was just her luck that I was there to take care of a sick cow, or I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Was anyone else with you?”
Smethers smiled. “The farmer disappeared the minute he realized what was happening. No place for a man, you know. I can’t say I was all that comfortable myself. It’s one thing to put your hand up a cow’s backside and quite another when it’s a young woman.”
Oh God, Toby thought, how much is he going to tell me?
“She should have been in a hospital,” Smethers continued. “From what I heard, her husband was an American. They would have looked after her. There was absolutely no need for her to be working on the farm.”
“So it was just you and her?” Toby asked. He wasn’t sure why he was asking the question. Smethers had already told him enough that he could have no doubt that the woman was Vera Chapman.
“Her friend was there,” Smethers replied. “I don’t think she wanted to be but I needed someone, and she was the only other woman.”
Her friend, Toby thought. Did he mean Carol? Had Carol actually been present?
A smile lit up the veterinarian’s weather-beaten face. He stabbed a finger at the entry in the ledger. “Anita. That’s my wife’s name. The mother wanted to give the little girl my wife’s name. Good thing it wasn’t a boy.”
“Why?”
“Cardrew,” said Smethers. “My first name is Cardrew. No little kiddie should be given a name like Cardrew. But they seemed pleased enough with Anita.”
“And no one else was there?” Toby asked, still feeling that something was missing. There was something here that he didn’t know.
“No,” said Smethers. “No one else. Isn’t my word good enough for you? You won’t be able to ask the POWs, not now.”
“What POWs?”
“The ones that were working on the farm; half a dozen of them, all Germans. One of them spoke good English. He’s the one who came and fetched me from the cowshed. No idea what his name was and you’d never find him now. Gone back to Germany, I should think. No one wanted them to stay over here.”
Smethers set the ledger back down on the desk.
“There’s no problem here, Mr. Whitby. I don’t know who you are representing or what they might be saying, but I can assure you that Vera Chapman Malloy gave birth to a healthy baby girl. I delivered the child, and I signed the birth certificate. Now, if that’s all you need to know, I have to get back to my committee meeting. Hoof and mouth disease. We’re in for a hard time, as if times are not already hard enough.”
Toby extended his hand. “Thank you, doctor. Sorry to have troubled you.”
“No trouble at all.”
He opened the door, and then turned back. “Have you seen the child, little Anita?”
“I have. I saw her this week.”
“How is she? No ill effects from being born in a barn and delivered by a vet?”
“None that I could see.”
“Did she inherit her mother’s red hair?”
Toby stared at the veterinarian. Gears began to slip and grind and then fall into a new place, the correct place. A new truth emerged, one that would mean the destruction of all his dreams.