‘You like him better than me, I mean.’ I look at her steadily. ‘Better than Mum.’

  She comes close, puts her finger under my chin to tilt my face towards her. ‘I don’t have a father.’ Her voice is low and soft. ‘At my home there was no one. No one to take care of me.’ I feel the curve of her nail pressing into my skin. ‘You are jealous… Pourquoi?’ She gives a short laugh and releases me, turning away as if I bore her. ‘You have everything.’

  19

  London, 1966

  Clara crouched over the lavatory, gasping at the contractions that pulled a band tight around her pelvis, crushing her. She knew these cramping pains. She’d had them before. She felt the hopeless gush of liquid between her legs, looked down at the slick of viscous fluid on her skin, the blood and water of birth coming too soon. She put her hands there for a moment, as if she could hold it back. She had to get to the phone, call Max at the office, call the hospital. She was crying in gulping sobs, the pain worse as she staggered up from the lavatory, fell to her knees and crawled into the hall. The carpet would be ruined. She didn’t care.

  They called it recurrent miscarriage: four late miscarriages one after another. Nothing wrong with her though, the doctor said cheerfully; it just happens like that for some people. You’re young; you can try again. When you’re ready.

  She didn’t feel young anymore. When she looked in the mirror, her face was like an old woman’s. Tired lines around her drooping mouth, the faint scar on her forehead standing out, white against her grey skin. She couldn’t recognise herself. Grief had etched lines onto Max’s face, but he could smile at a joke. Look inside a pram. He’d even held a friend’s baby in his arms.

  She couldn’t bear to see pregnant women, couldn’t stand the sight of other people’s children. It made her desperate, afraid, overwhelmed by jealousy, a clawing howl coming from the pit of her.

  Back from hospital, in bed at home in the flat, her stomach was sore, her breasts already softer, smaller. The sounds of the street brushed against the closed windows; she picked out traffic, the voices of passers-by, whooping sirens in the distance, but the world seemed removed: a vague noise on the periphery of her consciousness. The life inside her had gone.

  With all her pregnancies, she’d sensed a change in her body almost immediately. She’d described the feeling to Max as being like a ripe fruit, full and exultant. During the first pregnancy, she’d rejoiced in her thickening waist, her swelling belly and breasts. After the miscarriage, she’d been wary in her next pregnancy, afraid, walking with her hands clasped around her stomach as if she could hold her baby inside with the pressure of her hands. But scared as she was, she’d still dared to hope. The third one had hung on the longest. She’d just begun to give up on ever getting pregnant again when she’d been granted another chance. The cruelty of losing that baby too had changed everything.

  Max put his head around the door. ‘Anything I can get you, darling? Tea?’

  She shook her head. He was afraid of her grief. He didn’t know what to do, what to say. He found relief in action: buying her bunches of roses, filling hot-water bottles, fetching drinks, presenting her with meals on trays, laid out with the best silver. She felt unsettled by their lack of communication, the sliding away of understanding, of connection. But nothing mattered except her inability to have a baby. She yearned for the feel of her child in her arms, longed for it every second of every day. At night she woke up crying. She couldn’t think about going back to work, couldn’t talk to anyone. She couldn’t even read. Print blurred and she found that she’d been reading the same sentence over and over again, not understanding.

  She stopped caring about washing her hair or choosing her clothes. It was too much effort to clean the flat, even drying a plate an impossible chore. Max employed a cleaning lady who came in twice a week and made Clara cups of hot, sweet tea in between scrubbing tiles in the bathroom or dragging the Hoover up and down the hallway. Wincing at the banging noises coming from the skirting boards, Clara wondered why it was that tea was seen as a miraculous cure for sorrow.

  It was Max’s mother, up for a visit from Suffolk to help out, who suggested adoption. ‘You want a baby,’ she nodded her head at them, typically forthright and practical, ‘and there are plenty of unwanted babies who need parents. There are homes overflowing with them if you believe what the papers say.’

  The atmosphere of the room tightened. Max glanced at his mother, a warning in his eyes, and frowned. ‘I think…’ He looked over at Clara uncertainly. ‘I think Clara wants her own… our own…’

  They both looked at Clara. She shifted on the sofa. Her head was pounding. She seemed to have a headache every afternoon: a hammer working away inside her skull, smashing into the pulpy flesh behind her eyes.

  ‘Adopting?’ She licked parched lips. ‘But how… isn’t it difficult?’ She swallowed.

  ‘Maybe we should talk about it later,’ Max suggested softly, leaning across to touch her hand. ‘We need time to think it over…’

  ‘But it would be ours if its mother gave it up,’ she snatched her hand away, sitting up straight, ‘wouldn’t it?’ Clara stared at him, her eyes bright. ‘It would be my baby. From the moment I held it.’

  Charlie Anderson was a junior partner in the firm. He and Max played squash together on Tuesday nights. Charlie was slender-boned with a head of thick ash-blonde hair that would have spilled into curls if it hadn’t been cropped short; he hardly had a sign of stubble on his smooth face. He made up for his boyish looks by wearing immaculate dark suits, a serious expression and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that Max suspected were fake.

  ‘Drink?’ Charlie asked, hair damp from the shower. It was their habit to have a swift pint in the local pub after a match, but Max didn’t like to leave Clara alone for too long. His mother had stayed on for weeks to keep Clara company, but she’d caught the train home that morning, longing to get back to Suffolk and her garden.

  ‘Go on,’ Charlie said, when Max expressed his doubts, ‘got something I’d like to run by you. Won’t take long.’

  Sitting in a corner booth, Max nodded, ‘Cheers,’ wincing at the first bitter sip. Before them a display of framed photographs of men with moustaches: long and drooping, thick and bristly ones, and the elaborately curled variety. The pub was famous for its eclectic collection of memorabilia.

  ‘So,’ Charlie wiped froth from his top lip, ‘I’ve heard that you and your wife are looking to adopt.’

  Max, startled, nodded cautiously.

  ‘News travels,’ Charlie shrugged apologetically.

  ‘We’ve been looking into it, yes,’ Max said. ‘There are long queues at all the agencies we’ve tried. But we’ll keep at it, we’ll—’

  ‘The thing is,’ Charles interrupted, ‘my sister has gone and got herself pregnant and the old man hasn’t taken it too kindly. She’s only eighteen. She won’t say who the father is. She’s in a home just outside London–you know, one of those unmarried mothers’ places. She’s miserable. I’ve been to visit her a couple of times. The nuns are worse than prison wardens. It’s pretty grim.’

  Max’s beer stood untouched in front of him. He leant forward, his heart quickening.

  ‘She doesn’t want just anyone to have her baby. She says if she could only know a bit about who was going to have it, know that it was going to a good home, somewhere educated and kind, then she’d feel less terrible about having to give it up.’ Charlie looked up at the picture of Corgis hanging above Max’s head. ‘She’s awfully pretty, Suky, and she’s blonde, like me and you. Do you see what I’m getting at here…?’

  ‘How far gone is the… um…’

  ‘Seven months.’ Charlie told him. ‘Due in April.’

  ‘Who would we need to see?’ Max frowned, trying to suppress his excitement. ‘I mean, how does this work?’

  Charlie smiled. ‘A donation is all it takes, apparently, made out to the home. The nuns like cash best.’ He raised his glass to Max. ‘No queues, my friend. And no questions.’

  The nuns didn’t encourage visitors. One hour on Sundays was the rule. Max followed Charlie up a dark staircase and along a landing that smelt of disinfectant. Charlie was visiting his sister secretly; their parents had forbidden any mention of her name at home; friends and neighbours had been told that she’d gone abroad to work.

  She was sitting on her narrow bed in an otherwise empty dormitory, cross-legged on her rumpled bed, a needle in her hands, bent over a fall of blue fabric. In the folds, Max made out a gold dragon, and watched as the girl’s fingers sent the thread in and out of the cloth, spilling amber and red flames onto the fabric. A baby’s blanket. She didn’t look up. Charlie coughed, ‘Su, this is the man I told you about.’

  She was creamy-skinned with pale-blonde hair falling into her eyes. Her enormous belly pressed against her green dress, pulling her cardigan apart so that the two halves held together by one straining button. He noticed that there were flights of embroidered bumblebees and bright butterflies darting in and out of the line of buttons and around her cuffs, and guessed that they were her handiwork too. Her gaze was level, and he had the feeling that she was taking the measure of him, assessing him. He pulled in his stomach, squared his shoulders.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me. Can’t get out of bed today.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Orders to rest.’ She grimaced. ‘Orders come straight from God here, so no disobeying.’

  She uncrossed her legs, stretching them out, wriggling her stockinged toes. Max saw that her ankles were huge, distorted by some watery swelling under the surface.

  ‘Like an elephant’s, aren’t they?’ She looked at him from under her lashes. ‘I’m let off laundry duties for a couple of days. So I’m not complaining.’

  Max glanced away quickly, clearing his throat.

  ‘So you’re here to buy my baby?’

  Max started, his mouth falling open; but Charlie was already by the bed, bending over his sister. ‘For God’s sake, Su. Come on, you know this is the best choice we… you have.’ He dropped his hand onto her shoulder. ‘She’s just upset. She doesn’t mean it.’

  Suky nodded. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, bowing her head. ‘The thing is, since… this,’ she touches her stomach, ‘I don’t have any choices. Not anymore. And it’s hard… it’s really hard.’ She gave him that look again, a challenge hidden in it. ‘My brother says you and your wife want a child of your own.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I can’t keep mine. We’re not allowed to feed our babies or even take them out of the nursery. I hear them screaming. The other mothers, I mean,’ she swallows, ‘when their babies get taken. I have nightmares about it. I don’t want my baby given away to a stranger.’ Her face crumpled and she let out a sob. She pushed a fist into one eye, and Max thought that she looked like a child herself. ‘Sorry. Thumping headache. I’m not really myself today.’ She took another shuddering breath. ‘I feel like my baby is being punished, and it’s not fair on her. It’s me that’s in a state of “mortal sin”.’ She grimaced and held up her fingers to indicate speech marks hanging in the air. Her mouth began working soundlessly, her face reddening, fighting tears.

  ‘Shhh… don’t cry, darling.’ Charlie was at her side, his arms around her, nuzzling the top of her head. Suky blinked at him, her lashes wet, and he leaned forwards, pressing his lips over her trembling mouth. Max felt shock flaring, quick and cold in his gut. He averted his gaze, staring out of the window with rigid shoulders.

  When she looked up, she’d composed her face, wiped away the tears. ‘Can’t your wife have children?’

  Max rubbed his nose and shifted his weight onto the other foot. ‘She’s had miscarriages,’ he said abruptly. ‘We don’t want to go through that anymore.’ He paused, remembering, ‘Did you say “her?” ’

  She nodded, a small smile escaping. ‘I’m having a girl.’

  ‘Suky has strong instincts about things, don’t you?’ Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Thinks of herself as a bit of a psychic.’

  Ignoring her brother, Suky focused on Max. ‘I want you to have her. I can make that choice, can’t I?’ She put a hand to her stomach protectively and immediately her eyes widened; she patted her belly. ‘I just felt a kick. That must be a good sign.’ She bent her neck and unclasped a necklace, handing it to Max.

  Surprised, his fingers curled around the necklace. Water pearls. They felt warm from her skin, softly moulded nuggets, gleaming pinkish gold in the weak light.

  ‘For my daughter. To remember me by. And…’ she frowned. ‘Afterwards. I want to have the chance to visit her sometimes, I don’t know, as an aunt or something. I won’t interfere,’ her voice wavered, ‘but I want to know what she’s like. Otherwise, I don’t think I can bear it…’

  ‘You can sort all that out afterwards, old girl.’ Charlie patted her shoulder. ‘Let’s get this bit sorted first.’

  Suky looked at Max. ‘You’ll love her for me, won’t you?’ She lay back, her face pinched, hands folded limply across her bump. The embroidery slipping onto the bed.

  Charlie smoothed the hair from her forehead. Leaning close, he whispered low so that Max could hardly hear, ‘Of course he will. I told you I’d arrange everything. It’s going to be fine, Su.’

  There was a knock on the door. A nun put her head around it. ‘Time’s up.’ She gave the three of them a suspicious stare.

  Max thought of Clara at home in the flat, listless and distracted. She’d bitten her lip so often that it was bruised, sore skin smudging dark against her pallor. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled.

  20

  ‘Take her with you, will you?’ Sandra gives Penny a small shove on her shoulders so that she totters towards us.

  Fred shrugs and holds out his hand. ‘Come on then, you. No lip, mind.’

  Sandra is painting her toenails, her long thin legs hanging down from the caravan steps. She has her hair twisted around spiky curlers. Carol is asleep in a pushchair, shiny skin flushed with heat, her fat face folded into her neck, pouchy mouth dribbling. She is snoring gently, her fingers clenching and unclenching in her lap. I am reminded of the old people in the home.

  ‘Thanks, love.’ Sandra pauses with a tiny brush between her fingers. Her toes are splayed out, bits of cotton wool stuffed between them; the nails gleam fuchsia-pink. ‘It’ll give me a break before the baby wakes up.’

  Penny stumbles next to Fred, her knees scuffed grey. She gives me a grin. Her pigtails stick up from her scalp, stiff as horns. As we enter the village, people glance in our direction. Some even turn to stare. Joe drags his feet along the pavement and scowls. I have enough change in my jeans pocket to buy two popsicles from the village shop. ‘For you and Penny,’ I say, pressing the coins into Joe’s palm. ‘We’ll wait here.’ I give Fred a warning look when he opens his mouth to protest.

  As soon as the others have disappeared inside the shop, the bell clanging behind them, I turn to Fred and explain.

  ‘So,’ he says, in his slow way, ‘you want me to help you move that boat into the water… the one I saw you with?’

  ‘Yes.’ I glance back at the shop. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘You’re really going to nick it then?’ He grins.

  ‘Just borrowing it, to go to the island. I’ll give it back.’

  ‘Want me to come too? Me and Joe?’

  I open my eyes wide. ‘Would you?’

  He nods, rolling his shoulders.

  I breathe a sigh. It feels good to know that I won’t be alone. I can’t admit to being scared of the river to Fred, but he doesn’t seem to be frightened of anything, so he’s bound to make me feel braver.

  The others are back, licking melting tubes. Penny is already covered in drips, a slippery mess over her hands and lips. Even her sandals have splatters of green.

  Joe looks at Fred with one eyebrow raised. ‘So, what’s up?’

  ‘Tell you later,’ Fred says, leaning forward to take some of Joe’s purple popsicle.

  ‘Oi!’ Joe snatches it back.

  We wander down to the dinghy park, sitting on an upturned boat to look out at the comings and goings on the water. Fred stretches his legs in front of him and I see that his thighs are scorched with red stripes. From the river comes the snap of sails in the wind, the clinking of masts and seagulls crying overhead. The sailors are bright in orange and yellow lifejackets and I think of Eva’s jacket, found floating alone on the empty sea.

  The island looks paler in this light, bleached out. I wish I had the power to dive into the water like a seal, swimming under the waves and landing with flippers on the shore. Then I would become a selkie and rescue my sister.

  Joanna and Ellie are on the quay, crab nets in their hands. They catch sight of us and nudge each other, pointing in our direction. I swallow hard, shoving my hands into my pockets, looking away, willing them to leave us alone, hoping Fred won’t notice. It is embarrassing to be someone who is disliked.

  Penny has squatted on the stony ground and is playing a complicated and private game using things she’s found: a twist of blue rope, a fluted shell and a broken crab claw. Above her head, Fred explains the plan to Joe, who looks excited. We go over to the boat and test its weight, attempting to lift it between us. Locking our fingers under the solid wooden edge, together we raise it several inches from the ground. The dirty water in the bottom rocks and swishes from side to side, rowlocks dangling loosely on their bits of string, tapping at the planks.

  ‘Know how to row, do you?’ Fred indicates the oars with wobbling chin.

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  ‘Fred and me, we’ve never been in a boat before.’ Joe’s eyes shine, and I realise that it’s an adventure to them. A sharp pang makes me catch my breath. This is serious. My sister’s life is at stake. I nearly say the words out loud but I swallow them. I need their help–that’s all that matters. The fact that Fred has volunteered to go across the river with me is like a gift, something I hadn’t looked for, whole and shiny and unexpected.