Chapter 33

Slipping through the side door where the deliveries were left, Aggie went down the corridor, past the crucifixes and the statues of Mother Theresa and St Francis holding a bunch of plastic daffodils, trying not to let her shoes clack too loudly on the stone floors. To her left were the glass windows of Assumpta’s office. A little way past it, Aggie stopped and stepped into the alcove. She wanted to get into the office, and into that drawer inside it! She knew that was where the adoption papers were kept, she had seen Assumpta put away the duplicate documents when her own son had been born. The documents that said who the adoptive parents were, and where they lived. She was about to step forward when out of nowhere Sister Bernadette glided swiftly past, right in front of her. She took a sharp intake of breath and ducked further back out of sight, pressing herself right into the alcove. Fortunately, the nun’s veil, swishing forward, left Aggie undiscovered. The nun turned the corner and Aggie crossed the corridor and eased into the cramped cluttered office.

The drawer was unlocked and she quickly pulled out the papers, recognising them immediately. Most were signed, and all had written their addresses below their names.

And there it was. Gertrude Potter. Née Prudence Lafferty.

‘Gertrude. Imagine! Dreadful! They want to call Lily’s baby Gertrude!’ Aggie murmured. Her heart thumped at her ribs. Taking the sheaf of papers, she stuffed them into her pocket. Now all she had to do was deliver them safely to Clarence …

The next day, Clarence got off the bus, turned slowly to his left and looked up the street towards Sullivan’s where he and Lily had danced their troubles away before things had turned so ugly. But now his eyes began to cloud over with worry, because he realised she might never be quite the same optimistic, happy, sunny person again if he didn’t manage to make a success of what he was about to do. A couple of children were playing in the street with a steering wheel and banging a hubcap, treasures scavenged from one of the few bomb sites in Southport. He turned on his heels and walked briskly towards the station.

Was this completely ridiculous? He carried on, going over what Aggie had told him in his head. He thought back to when he had kissed Lily’s hand on the bandstand, a last smile, how that gesture had been so badly misunderstood by Lily’s lover. It was the thought of this, how indirectly it had led to Lily having to give her child away, how it was his fault in a way, that pushed him on, and gave him courage to redress the injury.

He was on the train in less than half an hour, resolute and with a clear head. The compartment was empty, the leather straps swinging back and forth rhythmically, which gave him time to come up with a plan. Sitting in the carriage that stuttered and groaned its way towards Bescar Station in Scarisbrick, he decided that he should be as discreet as possible, which was not an easy task for Clarence. He was used to people staring at him, looking over their shoulders, especially to see him in his uniform, nudging, and muttering, and today was no different.

‘Just find me the address of the Potters,’ he had said to Aggie, and he couldn’t quite believe it when she arrived at the Copper Kettle the following week waving it triumphantly.

‘But you can’t just steal the baby,’ she’d replied, puzzled. ‘That won’t work. How will you even get across the doorstep to have a conversation? Those kind of people will be terrified of you.’

Clarence smiled to himself now. That was precisely what he was relying on. He was going to use the ugliness of the mistrust and hatred he had lived with his entire life to Lily’s advantage.

Saltcotes Road wound up from the station. Clarence only knew it, because once, on his way to RAF Woodvale, he’d stepped off the train a stop too soon, and ended up dragging his blistered feet along its entire length, on a road that seemed to lead nowhere. But here he was on that same road, this time the correct one, the one that led towards some kind of reckoning. It crossed his mind that perhaps he should stop for a moment and make a plan. That would be sensible. But as nothing had occurred to him whilst sitting in the train, what did he expect would happen if he stopped now?

He paused at the kerb at the end of the road and, as he waited there, he knew that his next step could determine not only his future, but the destiny and happiness of others. And he sighed at the responsibility.

Suddenly, a car drew up outside the end house, and though he was still a way off, he could see it had a small front garden, and pink geraniums on the window boxes. Two people climbed out of it, a man and a woman. The Potters. It must be – the wife cradling the tiny bundle Clarence knew by instinct was Lily’s baby. It had to be – even from here Clarence could see that they were much too old to have a child of their own.

Mr Potter got back into the car and reversed it into the gravelled drive and the sight of it, a Rover, brought the night of the fight back to him. The smell of the exhaust as the engine idled only inches from his bloodied face, the stoop of the man as he looked down at Clarence with contemptuous disregard and told the others to scarper. There would be other Rovers, other stooping silhouettes in his life, but if he ever heard that voice again … And yet, this was why he was here. This hatred and prejudice that he was so used to, he was now going to turn to his favour.

He approached the house, which was partly obscured by ivy twisting and spreading up the walls, along the roof and around the chimney stack, and a large apple tree. There was a bird table in the garden and a trellis covered in a clematis. Down the side of the house there was a dog kennel, but no sign of a dog.

His heart pounded and for a moment he hesitated. But his feet weren’t stopping, so how could he? And at this moment they seemed to be functioning much better than his brain. With every step his wretched feet moved him forward. It was like a fast walk to the gallows in its grim inevitability. Now they made a right turn, through the gate, his damned feet, into the driveway, his shoes dancing lightly over the gravel surface, the house coming closer and closer, until there he was, at the front door.

No one could make him knock on the door, of course, except even as he thought of rebellion, he realised he was already too late. His hands had taken over and finished the job of his feet. Birds suddenly rose cackling and cawing from the chimney top as his knocks reverberated through the house and he could hear footsteps on the other side of the door – and those feet of his, which had worked so well to get him here, now refused to budge an inch.

In those final moments, as the door slowly opened, he thought he could pretend he was looking for gardening work and later, over tea, charm the lady into allowing Lily to visit from time to time, or maybe hold her one last time, because … because …

And there they were, Mr and Mrs Pokerface, he with a look of contempt that he seemed to wear so well, and she behind his shoulder, the grey hair wound up into a tight bun, fearful seeing him, lest this alien inter-loper at the door might attack them. And once again, standing in the frame of the doorway that was painted a brutish yellow, Clarence was reminded of the gulf between these people and his own.

‘What do you want? Where have you come from?’ demanded the man.

‘Excuse me, sir, can I hear a baby crying?’ said Clarence.

Screeching more like, its tiny voice hoarse with the effort.

‘It doesn’t matter what you can hear. I said, what do you want?’

‘She cries all the time. So what?’ said the woman flatly, which drew a look of rebuke from her husband.

‘She misses her mother, I suppose,’ replied Clarence, noticing the deep grooves etched into her skin and how dreadfully tired she looked.

The husband, with his braces and sleeveless knitted jumper, shirtsleeves pushed up his arms and held there with silver armbands, bristled. ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

And Clarence, instinctively doing the opposite, hunched his shoulders and held up his palms in an act of deference.

‘I’m sorry, sir, ma’am, but I hate to hear the babies cry. My mamma, she would have me comfort my baby sisters when I was a boy.’

The truth was Clarence had never known his mother, and was the youngest in his family, but the strong West Indian accent he’d used to tell this walloping fib did the job that he had planned it to do.

‘I’m closing this door now! Get away from here, or I shall have no hesitation in calling the police. Leave now. Or I’ll set the dog on you,’ snarled the man.

The couple stepped back inside and, eyeing Clarence with a deep distrust, the man moved to close the door, only to find Clarence had placed a foot between the door and the jamb.

‘Please sir, wait! There is something you have to know about the baby, something important, really important, sir.’

He had no real inkling of what that information might be, just that this was his chance to do something big, something brave, something that would make a real difference to someone’s life – and he wasn’t going to let them shut him out so easily. It did the trick; the door slowly opened again.

The couple stared at him, the stranger at their door, this man, so different, so foreign-looking. How could he know something of their newly acquired infant, something that they should know?

‘Well? Spit it out. What could you possibly tell us about our baby that we don’t know?’

‘I know the baby is adopted, sir, from St Jude’s. But there is something else. If I may see the child, sir, to make sure I am not mistaken?

Clarence’s heart was thumping; he could hear the baby crying inside the house, as if calling to him, ‘Don’t give up now, you’ve come this far!’ He looked imploringly at the couple, and saw their resolve wither as their concern grew.

‘Wait there,’ was all the man said, and the door closed.

Beyond, Clarence could hear their voices.

‘For pity’s sake, woman! Stop the bloody child bawling. I can’t hear myself think!’

‘You stop her! I can’t. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing,’ came the angry retort.

This might be easier than he had expected, thought Clarence. He wondered if they were bringing the child, or calling the police; whether he should stand and wait, or make a run for it. Unable to stay still, he paced, marking a circular route that brought him back to where he’d started. Was he doing the right thing? This was a beautiful house. He’d seen the wooden panelling in the hall, the carpets that touched each wall, the open fields across the road. It was a wonderful place for a child to grow up in, running free, away from the bombs and the dust and the fear. ‘But away from your own dear mother,’ he murmured out loud, and he knew what that felt like.

He stood outside the door and heard again the foot-falls from inside and watched the door slowly open again. The man stood with his hands at his side and the woman held the crying baby against her crisp white cotton blouse.

‘Let me see her face? Please?’ begged Clarence.

And slowly the woman turned the baby towards him.

When he saw her dark swirls of curly baby hair and her rosy face, he couldn’t resist a smile. By a miraculous coincidence, for that’s all it was, Clarence knew, the baby stopped crying as soon as she set eyes on him and even gurgled as if to say, ‘Almost there, almost there …’

‘She looks just like my mamma,’ he said, a dishonest tear rolling down his cheek.

The silence roared as the couple looked from one to another in panic, then back at Clarence.

‘What the hell are you saying? Do you mean to say …?’

The woman stared at the child, then abruptly held it away from her.

‘She is my daughter, sir,’ Clarence said managing to put a choke in his voice. ‘I-I’m sorry. I only wanted to see her one last time. Forgive me.’

‘This is bloody nonsense! She looks nothing like you. She’s not a—’

But the woman interrupted her husband. ‘Oh my God, Stanley! Oh my God!’ she cried, uninhibitedly, unashamedly.

And Clarence, now speaking with the thick Creole accent of his childhood, tears springing from an entirely imagined story, stepped forward and said, definitively and proudly, ‘Oh, she is mine, sir. Trust me. Her colour will come later. In a few weeks she will be as brown and beautiful as a berry. Look at her beautiful hair and her tiny face. Such thick, wiry hair. Uncanny. She is so like my mother. Thank you. Thank you for letting me see her.’

The couple looked down at the child as if seeing her for the first time.

‘May I hold her one last time, sir? My mamma said I should bring her back home to Trinidad, but I know that won’t be possible. I can see the love you have for her, ma’am, see it plain as can be.’

‘Trinidad …?’ said the man.

‘But we met the child’s grandmother,’ stuttered the woman. ‘And – and … Stanley, we met her grandmother, didn’t we? She didn’t look … So her daughter … she … she …?’

‘Lily? Her parents are Irish. Yes, this little baby will grow up Creole with a dose of Irish, that’s for sure. Her blue eyes will soon turn black as coal, as sure as night turns into day.’

She barely knew she was doing it, but the woman felt her own hair, as if to subliminally root her to some touchstone that separated her from this man.

Clarence paused, frowned. ‘Did the nuns not tell you about me? Ah well, I expect the sisters wouldn’t see colour as a barrier. They only wanted the best for the child.’

‘Yes. But, but … Hold her. Go on,’ she said, shaking with fury.

‘Really?’ he said.

‘Woman!’ cried the man.

‘Why not?’ she said, thrusting the bundle into Clarence’s arms. ‘In fact, now I come to think of it, clearly there’s been a mistake. A dreadful mistake. This was not the child we wanted. All she does is cry. All the time. She might be ill. Or something. Yes, that explains it. The crying. We should tell the sisters right away. A mistake. I’m sure of it. Isn’t that right, Stanley?’

The man frowned, stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and shook his head, puzzled and disappointed. Clarence, who was rocking Lily’s daughter in his arms, hugged her close, kissed her on top of her head, and went to pass her back. The woman didn’t seem to notice him, didn’t lift her arms to take the child, but remained motionless, seeing only a future with a child that could not be mistaken for her own, a stranger in their house, a cuckoo in their nest.

And Clarence, seeing a look that one might almost mistake for relief cross her face as her husband took the child, knew that at that moment he had repaid his debt to Lily.