Black Cake(50)

What if her mummy were still there?

What if Eleanor could return without having to explain where she had been all these years? Then, yes, she would go back, she would gather tamarind pods from the floor of the backyard and sit on the concrete steps of the veranda near the orange spikes of the bird of paradise. She would show her children how to crack open the pods, pull off the strings, and roll the pulp in a bowl of sugar. She would take them down to the cove to swim in the sea.

But you didn’t just disappear for five decades and then go back as if nothing had happened. She wouldn’t try to go back, anyway, if she couldn’t take all three of her children with her. And after fifty years, Eleanor still had no idea where one of them was.





Decency





What would Byron think of her if he knew the whole story?

Eleanor hugged her son before he walked down the driveway toward the car. She looked at him, bright-eyed and straight-backed like his father, and knew that nothing else she did would ever be as important as this, this raising up of a decent young person and sending them into the world. Because the world needed decent, even more than it needed brilliant, which her son also happened to be.

But this beautiful man had a weakness. He could be obstinate. With Benny, for example. He’d had an attachment so great to his baby sister that he had never really seen Benny for the young woman that she had turned out to be. Benny had grown up and asserted herself and Byron had resisted her evolution, just as, admittedly, Eleanor and Bert had. He had grown cooler to Benny over the years, though Benny had continued to follow him around the room with that puppy-dog look. Byron was like his father in that way. When he couldn’t control or understand something, he would distance himself from it.

Would Eleanor lose her son’s esteem if she told him the truth?

Eleanor’s husband had always known part of the truth, but not all of it. Bert had covered for Eleanor for years because he believed that he was protecting their family, because he understood that the woman he loved had been robbed of her destiny. But he never did learn how much she had lost. He never knew about her first child. Eleanor had lied to her husband for all those years because she understood that if you wanted someone to keep loving you, you couldn’t ask them to bear all of your burdens, couldn’t risk letting them see all of who you were. No one really wanted to know another person that well.

Unless, of course, a person could say, See? Here she is, my long-lost baby girl. I’ve found her. I’ve made everything all right.

While her arms were wrapped around her son’s rib cage, Eleanor felt his heartbeat tap-tap-tapping at her through the weave of his shirt. She felt this life-of-her-life in her arms and thought of her first child, a pale, wailing baby calmed by her breast, then pulled out of her arms at six weeks. Eleanor now felt that other child’s heartbeat murmuring under her skin, rapping at the inside of her head.

Byron made a U-turn in the cul-de-sac and was waving slowly, one muscular, brown arm held out the window. Look at that smile! Eleanor wanted to run after the car, shout to Byron, call him back, explain to him that no, raising him and his baby sister was not the most important thing that she had ever done. What defined Eleanor most was not what, or whom, she had held close but what she had allowed herself to let go of.

Why hadn’t she torn up the paper they’d made her sign the day they took her baby girl away? Why hadn’t she bolted from the taxi while she still had the baby in her arms? Why hadn’t she pounded on doors, robbed a bank, sold herself, done anything to keep her child? Had her daughter, in all these years, ever lain awake at night wondering, like Eleanor, about the mother who had left her behind? Had the questions burrowed into her bones like a woodworm, the way they did every time Eleanor thought about her own mummy?

In fifty years, times had changed. The forced adoptions had been in the news. Graying women like Eleanor were shown embracing their biological children, faces shiny with tears. The government was being asked to apologize. Someone had even made a movie. Elly had thought of renewing her search for her daughter, of asking the authorities for help. But each time, she’d hesitated. Her baby girl, now a middle-aged woman, would want to know about her father. And Eleanor’s other children would want to know, too.

She tried to imagine what her daughter would prefer. Eleanor thought of her own mother, who had gone away and never come back for her. What would Eleanor really want to know about her mother’s reasons? What if knowing the truth were to hurt more than the longing? Eleanor could tell her firstborn child that she’d met a handsome boy all those years ago and had yielded to temptation. People talked about these things nowadays. But she was afraid that her daughter would look her in the eye and know that she was lying.

Would her daughter hate her more, then, for having given her up or for having failed to stay out of her life?

And then there was that other matter, which was no small matter. If Eleanor Douglas were to resurface in England today, someone might note her connection to one Coventina Brown, born Coventina Lyncook, who had been reported killed in a train accident in 1967, who had suddenly disappeared from another country while under suspicion of having committed murder. A murder that remained unsolved.

The false narrative that Eleanor had woven for the benefit of her loved ones had become a net that had trapped her. And as if that weren’t enough, Eleanor had also let go of her youngest daughter. She had allowed Benny to walk away from her and Bert when, perhaps, she’d needed them most. Only Eleanor hadn’t seen it that way at the time.