Whitethorn Woods Read online

  The voices for and against the road, the voices from the woods, were only gathering their strength – they had seen nothing yet.

  CHAPTER 9

  Talking to Mercedes

  Part 1 – Helen

  Ah, there you are, Mercedes. I was having a little sleep there. I dreamed I was back in Rossmore, walking down the crowded main street. I often dream that. But you wouldn’t know where it is, it’s over in Ireland across the sea from here. Ireland is only fifty minutes on a plane from London. You should go there sometime. You’d like it there, you’re religious and it’s very Catholic.

  Well, it was anyway.

  I’ve always liked you, Mercedes, much better than the day nurses – you have more time for people, you’ll make a cup of tea. You listen. They don’t listen, it’s sit up and wake up and get up and cheer up. You never say that.

  You have a nice cool hand, you smell of lavender, not of some disinfectant. You are interested.

  You say your name is Mercedes and that you would like to marry a doctor. You would like to send your mother more money. But it took me weeks to find even that out about you, Mercedes, because you only want to talk about me and how I feel.

  I wish you would call me Helen rather than Madam. Please don’t call me Mrs Harris. You are so friendly, so interested in my family who come to visit. My tall, handsome husband James, my gracious mother-in-law Natasha, my wonderful, beautiful daughter Grace.

  You ask me all kinds of questions about them and I tell you, it’s a pleasure to tell you things. You smile so much. And you aren’t curious and don’t act like the police, always asking questions. That’s what David seems like to me. You know David, he is Grace’s boyfriend. I think you sense that about him, you often move him gently on when he is here. You know that he distresses me.

  But you I could talk to for ever.

  You love the story about the night I met handsome James Harris twenty-seven years ago when I borrowed my flatmate’s dress to go to a party. He said that it was the same colour as my eyes and that I must be very artistic. In fact it was the only dress between the three of us that was smart enough for me to wear.

  I told you the truth about that, and about how fearful I was about meeting his mother Natasha for the first time. Their home was so big and impressive, her questions so probing. I had never eaten oysters before – it was such a shock to me. And I told you the truth about a lot of things, about how kind they always were to me in the orphanage where I grew up and how they insisted on making my wedding cake. Natasha had objected at first because she thought it would be amateurish but even she was pleasantly surprised.

  I went back to see them often at the orphanage. They told me I was the only child in the home who didn’t ask about my parents. The others were all very anxious to know details and if it would ever mean their mothers would be coming back to collect them.

  But I wanted to know nothing. This was my home. Someone had given me, Helen, away, no doubt for good reasons at the time. What more was there to ask? To know?

  I haven’t told the Sisters that I am so ill, Mercedes. They couldn’t bear it. Instead I told them that I’m going abroad with James and will be in touch later. I have left them something in my will and a letter of thanks. It’s important that people be thanked for what they do. Really it is. Otherwise they might never know how much they are appreciated. Like you, for example. I thank you a lot because I am truly grateful to meet someone who will listen to me so well and be so interested in my story.

  You who have worked so hard and saved so much would understand how hard I too worked when I did my secretarial course here in London.

  The others in the class spent ages having coffee and going window shopping, but I studied and practised very hard.

  I lived in a flat with two other girls who loved cooking so they taught me how to enjoy it too.

  On Saturdays I worked at a cosmetic counter in a big store and I got makeovers and free samples as well as my wages; on Sundays I worked in a garden centre which taught me a lot and so I did flower arranging and window boxes for people who lived near by. By the time I had landed a good job in the City with a really proper salary I was much more accomplished than many girls who had left the orphanage with me. They always told me when I went back there that I looked like a real lady, they were proud of me and I could marry a duke if I put my mind to it.

  But I put my mind to marrying James Harris.

  I used to read novels about people like James, but I didn’t believe they really existed.

  He was such a gentleman in every sense. He never raised his voice, he was always courteous, he had a way of smiling that lit up his whole face. I was determined to marry him and I worked hard at that like I had worked at everything else. I hid nothing about my past. I did not want his mother Natasha investigating and discovering things about little Helen from the orphanage, so I was totally up front about everything. And it paid off. She finally agreed to the wedding and I think that in a way she sort of respected me.

  I was a beautiful bride. Did I show you the pictures? Of course I did. I just wanted to look at them once more.

  All we were waiting for was a child.

  Someone to inherit Natasha’s large estate. You don’t call it money if you’re very rich, Mercedes, you call it an ‘estate’. So we were married for three years and no sign of my becoming pregnant. I was anxious, James was concerned and Natasha was incensed.

  I went to a doctor in a completely different part of London and had an examination.

  I wasn’t ovulating, it turned out, so I would need fertility treatment.

  I knew only too well how much James would object to this. If it were proven that he was well capable of fathering a child but that his wife could not conceive, things would change between us. If Natasha knew, then the world as we knew it would end.

  So I realised there was no way James and I could go together like normal couples who had problems conceiving and could have in vitro treatment. There was no way that I could go alone and get a secret artificial insemination. It didn’t work like that apparently.

  James wouldn’t consider surrogate parenting, so there was no point in discussing it. Nor adoption, even if there had been any children to adopt. And I didn’t even want to think of Natasha’s face on the subject of an overseas baby being brought to our home. A little African Harris! An Asiatic Harris! Don’t make me laugh.

  No, Mercedes, you are very kind but I’m not upsetting myself, no, not at all. I know that you are always sensitive to my getting upset especially when Grace’s David keeps interrogating me about things. But this is not like that. I’m just trying to explain it all to you. You see, I want to tell you this, I need to tell you. Can you think of it as if I am writing you a letter? A letter to Mercedes from Helen.

  Yes, I will have a sip of tea, thank you so much, my dear, you are always there when people need you.

  So, as I was saying, I had to think what to do next.

  Now this was twenty-three years ago, you were only a little toddler then, running around in the sunshine in the Philippines. It is sunny there, isn’t it? But I was here in London, worried out of my mind.

  I had always been good at finding a solution; I would not be beaten by this. One of the girls at work had been on a holiday in Dublin, over in Ireland, and when they were there they had gone to this place, Rossmore. It was a small town but was very beautiful, it had an old castle and a forest called Whitethorn Woods, and even a wishing well. A saint’s well it was, actually. You’d know about that, being Catholic, Mercedes. People went to pray to a saint and they got their wishes answered. They left things there to thank her.

  What did they wish for? I wondered.

  Everything apparently, the saint had a big job on her hands. People prayed for husbands and for cures from illness. And a lot for babies. There were lots of little baby bootees and things tied to the thorny bushes from people wanting a baby of their own. Imagine!

  Well, I did imagine. Day and night I
imagined. That is where I would find our child.

  These people wouldn’t have gone on praying unless there had been some results. So next time James went away on a business trip, I took a couple of days off from my office and sneaked over to Ireland and took a bus to this place Rossmore.

  It was extraordinary, the whole thing. It was really very strange. Quite a modern town with nice shops and good restaurants, I even got my hair done in a smart salon. But just a mile out on the road there was this real scene of Third World superstition. Sorry, Mercedes, no offence but you know what I mean.

  There were dozens of people, each one with their own story. There was this old woman praying to St Ann. That’s who it was, St Ann, the mother of Mary who was the mother of Jesus, but you’d know all that. We used to have a statue of her back in the Home.

  Anyway this woman was asking that her son who was a drug addict would get cured, and then there was a girl praying that her boyfriend would not hear that she had had a stupid fling with another man. A boy saying he simply had to pass this exam as the whole family were depending on him. A fourteen-year-old girl was asking that her father would go off the drink.

  So I closed my eyes and I spoke to this saint and I said I’d go straight back to my religion, which I had sort of forgotten about since I met James and Natasha, if she would arrange for me to get pregnant.

  It was very peaceful there, and anything seemed possible. And I was so sure she would arrange it. Until the afternoon bus came I spent the day looking around Rossmore. There wasn’t much traffic back then, you could walk about easily. I believe it’s changed utterly now. Everyone seemed to know each other, greeting half the people in Castle Street, which was the main street. They were all families, I noticed. But, I thought, when I came back to this place with my child one day, I would be part of a family too. I would come back to Rossmore and thank St Ann for her help.

  A lot of these people left their children sort of parked outside shops since the prams were too big and bulky to bring in. Passers-by would pause to admire the chubby babies in prams. Dozens of them. Soon I would have our baby in a pram, James’s and my baby. Natasha’s grandchild. And when we did, we would never leave the child out of our sight.

  But the months went on and on, with no sign of any intervention on St Ann’s part. I looked back with great rage at my useless trip over to her well and I got very annoyed. I kept thinking of that town where the women just left their babies for all to see in the main street without anyone to mind them. They just left their babies out in the street so casually while so many of the rest of us were aching for a child.

  That’s when I got the idea.

  I would go to Ireland, find a pram and bring our baby home. It didn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl. If it were our own child we couldn’t choose anyway so this made it all the more natural somehow.

  It needed a lot of planning.

  You didn’t need passports to go to Ireland or anything but still there was more chance of being spotted on a plane or at an airport than on a ferry. So I made my plans to go by sea.

  I told James that I was pregnant, and that I had gone not to his and Natasha’s family doctor but to an all-women-doctors clinic and that I preferred it this way. He was totally understanding, and gentle with me. And of course utterly delighted with my great news.

  I begged him not to tell his mother yet. Said that I needed time. He agreed that it should be our secret until we were sure that everything was on course. After three months I said that I now preferred to sleep alone. He agreed reluctantly.

  I read all the symptoms of pregnancy and acted accordingly. I went to a theatrical costumier and got a special mould made to simulate a pregnant stomach. I explained that it had to look good under a nightdress for my stage part. They were very interested in it and I had to be more and more vague about the whole thing in case they wanted to come to the theatre and see me act!

  Natasha was overjoyed. When she came to lunch every Sunday she even helped me clear the dishes instead of sitting there like a stone.

  ‘Helen, my dear, dear girl, you have no idea how happy this makes me,’ she said, laying her hand on my stomach. ‘When will we feel the baby kick, do you think?’

  I said I would ask them at the clinic.

  I realised that I would have to go away around the time of the so-called birth of the baby. This would be a problem but I solved it. I told James and Natasha that there was something about approaching motherhood that made me nostalgic for the orphanage, the only home I remembered. James wanted to come with me but I said that this was a journey I wanted to make on my own. And this was a busy time in his antiques business, he needed to be in London. I would be back in a week, long, long before the birth was due. It took a lot of persuasion but they let me go.

  I had already begun my maternity leave from the office. I was in charge, I could do what I liked.

  I did go to the orphanage where they were delighted with my pregnancy. They were particularly delighted with the timing because apparently my birth mother was in a hospital dying and she wanted desperately to see me just once. To explain.

  I said I wanted no explanation.

  She had given me life, that was fine. I needed no more. I had just got on with it.

  The Sisters and staff were shocked at me. Here was I, with a good job, a wealthy husband, a beautiful home, and now expecting my own child. Why could I not open my heart to a poor woman who had not been so lucky in life?

  But I would not be moved. I had too much on my own mind. I was about to go to another country, steal a baby for myself, a child for James, an heir for Natasha Harris. Why should I get involved with the ramblings and remorse of some stranger, which had come far, far too late?

  Then I drove on and left my car near the ferry terminal. I wore a wig and whipped out my false tummy and put it in the boot of the car. I had bought a cheap raincoat, a rug and a lifelike doll and then I was ready. They didn’t have closed circuit TV so much in those days but I wanted to make sure that if there was a hue and cry nobody would be able to call attention to a woman with a baby boarding a boat for the UK – someone else would be sure to mention having seen her going in the other direction. I sat out in the open air cuddling the doll.

  One or two other mothers approached me to have a look at the baby but I said apologetically that she didn’t like strangers. You see, I was already thinking of her as my daughter.

  Then I got the bus to Rossmore, cuddling the doll very close to me. It was a busy Saturday in the town – I walked the length of Castle Street until my feet were sore.

  I did some shopping as well, talcum powder, napkins, soothing creams. There were indeed many prams outside stores on this visit also. Innocent, trusting people in a safe town, some might say. I didn’t say that. Criminally careless, neglectful parents who didn’t deserve children, was what I said.

  I had to be careful.

  The bus that I must get would leave at three. It would be two hours to the ferry. I must take the child just before the bus left, not earlier, no point in giving the authorities time to search.

  It’s strange. I could almost draw a picture of the people in that crowded street that day. There was an old priest, you know, wearing a soutane, the sort of black dress they used to wear, right down to the feet. And he was shaking everyone’s hand. Half the population seemed to be out shopping, and greeting each other. I was standing on the steps of the Rossmore Hotel when I saw a little baby in a pram. Just lying there asleep and with a small Yorkshire terrier tied by his lead to the handle of the pram. I crossed the road and it was over in seconds, the doll was in a litter bin and the baby was in my arms wrapped in my rug. The eyes were tightly closed but I could hear a little heart beating close to mine. It all felt totally right as if it was meant to happen. As if in some curious way St Ann had led me to this child.

  I got on the bus and looked back for a last time at Rossmore. The bus bumped across the country to the ferry and then I moved with my daughter on to the bo
at. I must have been well away long before the alarm was raised. And who would have thought to search the ferries at once anyway? I was settled in my car by the time they realised that this was a fullblown child abduction.

  I had done what I set out to do: I had got my child.

  A little girl who would be called Grace Natasha. She must be between two and four weeks old. It was despicable, leaving a child that age to fare for herself, I told myself. She was better by far that I had come along to claim her, to give her a better life. No one could find me now, I told myself, as I prepared her first formula bottle on a spirit stove at the back of the car.

  And the wonderful thing, Mercedes, was that nobody ever did.

  I had it all very well sorted out, you see.

  I reinstated my false tummy, and left the baby in the car while I checked into a shabby guest house. During the middle of the night I pretended to wake with labour pains and insisted on driving myself to the hospital. In fact I drove back to my orphanage.

  I told them that I had delivered the baby myself and needed them to look after me for a couple of days until I recovered from the shock.

  One of the staff said that I couldn’t possibly have had this baby since I was there a couple of days ago. This was a baby who was two weeks old, not three days. Another wanted to get me a doctor. But these were people I had lived with for seventeen years of my life. I could manage them. And they loved me, don’t forget. I had been no trouble all those years there. I had remembered them and come back to visit. I had even sent contributions to their building fund. They weren’t going to question poor little orphan Helen, whose own mother was dying.

  They knew – of course they knew. These were women who lived with children all day and all night. Maybe they should have reported it, I suppose you could say that. But then they thought that I must have bought the baby. And they knew I was hiding it from my rather grand husband and mother-in-law. So they went along with the fiction.