‘I never thought you did it,’ Chick says to Nora. ‘You seemed like a nice lassie. I’d seen you at that ceilidh, dancing with that big farmer’s laddie, what was his name?’
‘He doesn’t have one,’ I tell Chick.
~ Robert, Nora says sadly, he was called Robert.
‘The evidence was against you,’ Chick says to her. ‘I’d have done the same in your shoes, I’d have legged it. Any more tea in that pot?’
~ I ran to save the child, Nora says.
‘From what?’ the ‘child’ asks.
~ From Lachlan, from your self, from the past you didn’t know about yet.
I have no mother, no brother, no sister, no father. I do not want to be a person who opened their eyes on the world for the first time and saw their mother dead. I don’t want to be a person who set foot on earth only to be tossed back into water, like a fallen leaf, an abandoned sweet wrapper.
~ The first thing you saw was the moon, Nora corrects me.
‘And that makes it all right?’
I would like my self to be given back to me. I would like a mother, father, brother, sister, aunt. I would like a family dog and a family car. I would like to live in a traditional thirties semi with a swing in the garden and I would like to eat lamb chops for my tea, with potatoes and peas and afterwards a Victoria sandwich cake made by the hand of a genuine mother.
‘Jam and buttercream?’ Chick says, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
~ Well, I can’t give you that , Nora says, but I can tell you what happened afterwards and of how you came to dry land. For I was not the only thing to snag on the fallen tree in the river. As I was trying to drag myself out of the water I noticed something caught by a branch. I heard its cry –
‘Its?’
~ Yours. I heard your cry even above the noise of the rushing water. The lacy matinée coat had hooked itself onto a branch and you were bobbing around like a baby made of cork rather than flesh.
I managed to get both of us out of the water and back to the house where I warmed you up as well as possible. I was sure you were going to die. There were plenty of clothes for you. Mabel had knitted a layette that would have done for quadruplets. When I took off your soaking things I found her little crucifix around your neck, it was a wonder it hadn’t strangled you.
‘And I suppose you are going to hand it to me now,’ I say to her, ‘as one does in all good stories, so that I will have a treasured memento of the mother I never knew.’
~ Well I lost it actually, she says carelessly. On a train. Or a bus. Who knows? Pass me an Abernethy.
So. Then I took what money I could find in the house, took the diamonds, sitting carelessly in the sideboard drawer – I was very calm – I was thinking that I could sell them when we ran out of money. Of course, I never did for fear I would be discovered. I packed baby clothes and made sandwiches, I even took a Thermos of tea. It was almost as if we were setting off on a great adventure. Then I drove away in Effie’s car – I had a vague idea how to drive it, I’d sat next to her a few times and there was no traffic around. I stopped in a passing-place to feed the baby, put her to my breast and milk came. It seemed like a miracle, a sign, but I’ve read of such things since.
‘So, you were a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who’d just killed her sister who was really her mother and you were breastfeeding a baby who wasn’t yours on a deserted Highland road in the middle of the night.’ I wonder if there are any words that can adequately cover this situation. The ones that spring to mind – absurd, surreal, grotesque – don’t really do, somehow.
~ Then I drove to a station and waited on the platform with the milk churns and caught an early train over the border. We went to London where we were anonymous and then to Brighton. I saw the name ‘Andrews’ above a butcher’s shop and thought it ordinary enough and – well, you know the rest.
I kept track of things in the newspapers – I could hardly go to a police station and protest my innocence over two murders when I was guilty of the third – they still hanged people then. So I went on the run.
And now, Nora says, Effie turns up alive after all these years. It makes no difference, of course – for I meant to murder my mother and intention is everything. Another slice of Battenberg, Mr Petrie? she asks, as regal as a duchess.
‘Call me Chick,’ Chick says, ‘and yes it was Moira, and yes, she did leave me.’
~ What a cow, Nora says cheerfully and Chick says, ‘How did you know?’
I know what happened to Effie because she told me, just before I fell off the quay of the Victoria Dock. I didn’t understand then what she was saying, but I do now.