Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
Back in the States, when Beatrice’s mom had suggested she take a job as a nanny, it had seemed like a great idea: her mom would be happy because she wasn’t working in a bar (dangerous) or in retail (tacky), and she’d be happy because – well, how hard could it be? She’d have loads of time, she’d thought, while the kids were at pre-school or napping or whatever. Investigating her past would be easy to do.
But the only downtime she ever seemed to get during the day was the all-too-brief window around lunchtime when Parker had her nap. At home in the evenings, now that her quest to sift through the papers and files on the first floor of the house had ended fruitlessly, she sometimes shut herself in her room and got on her laptop, but the dial-up internet connection was glacially slow and none of the websites she’d managed to find had yielded any useful information.
By the time she’d read some old lady’s account of her experiences in the East End during the Blitz – respect to her, learning to use WordPress in her eighties, which was more than Beatrice could do at twenty-two – it was almost midnight and she could no longer keep her heavy, scratchy eyes open. An online forum dedicated to local history had proved similarly unhelpful, being full of misty-eyed nostalgia, recipes for fruitcake and in-fighting.
She’d been in London for almost four months, and she was no further in her quest than she’d been when she’d stepped off the plane at Heathrow. And what was more, her patience with the children, with the endless, grinding sameness of every day, was wearing thin. She didn’t know how much longer she would be able to stick with this job before she gave up and headed off to Paris for the next leg of her gap year – but that would mean leaving unfinished business, abandoning the whole purpose that had brought her here in the first place.
She needed to try a different approach – perhaps a more analogue one.
‘Are you not eating your sandwich, Parker?’ she asked.
The little girl was poking without enthusiasm at the peanut butter and jelly, which had, until today, been her favourite thing.
‘No.’ Parker’s bottom lip stuck out obstinately.
‘Are you not hungry?’
‘Don’t like it. Don’t want it.’
Feeling the familiar surge of annoyance, Beatrice eased the knots of tension from her shoulders and walked over to the window. It was raining and the view of London was obscured in a heavy, grey haze.
Barring the weather, every day was the same as the previous one, with only more of the same to look forward to.
‘Right,’ she said, forcing cheerfulness into her voice. ‘You don’t want it, don’t eat it. Have a banana, then we’ll go and fetch your brother. And then we’re going on an adventure.’
Parker brightened, wolfed down the banana Beatrice peeled for her and happily put on her raincoat, which was clear plastic printed with yellow ducks. Pulling the zipper up under her chin, Beatrice felt her irritation subside: when Parker looked as adorable as she did now, it was hard to stay annoyed with her for long.
‘What venture?’ Parker asked as Beatrice helped her put on her yellow rubber boots.
‘We’re going to go to the library.’
Beatrice couldn’t think why it had taken her so long to hit on this idea. Every day for weeks, she’d walked past the drab red-brick building, seeing but not really noticing the sign outside it, blandly official and bearing the tree logo of the local authority.
But now it seemed like the best plan ever. Libraries were great for kids – there was no way Frances would object to such an educational, enriching outing. There’d be story time, or crafts or something of that nature – she’d even seen a flyer on the noticeboard by the door that morning advertising ‘Children’s Hour – weekday afternoons’. Beatrice felt a rush of elation at the prospect of palming the kids off on another responsible adult. And then she’d be free to carry out her own research in a place that was, after all, built for that exact purpose.
‘Come on,’ she urged Parker. ‘Let’s go get your brother.’
Half an hour later, Beatrice had got the children settled down on two small plastic chairs that made up part of a circle of identical chairs. A grinning young man in shorts and a T-shirt – not at all the motherly, bespectacled lady Beatrice had been expecting – was introducing them to ‘Rap and Rhyme Time’.
Could she leave them here and disappear for a few precious minutes on her own? She glanced around: the women who seemed to be in charge of the other children – mothers or nannies like herself – were dispersing, some heading for the café in chattering groups, others wandering off between the library shelves, doubtless craving peace and silence as Beatrice was herself.
‘You’re welcome to stay.’ The young man, who’d introduced himself to the children as Neil, caught Beatrice’s eye. ‘But they’ll be fine. I’m CRB checked, and the kids don’t generally play up with me.’
‘Sure?’ she asked.
He nodded, his relaxed grin providing the reassurance Beatrice needed.
She backed away, slowly at first, but Slate and Parker were transfixed by Neil, who had taken out a guitar. Exhaling with relief, she returned to the main reception desk, which was staffed by a middle-aged woman with cornrow hair and glasses.
‘May I help you?’ she asked.
‘I was hoping…’ Now that she was here, Beatrice realised she wasn’t sure what she had been hoping for. To have answers to her questions presented to her on a platter, possibly. ‘I wanted to do some research into local history.’
‘The history section’s up on the first floor,’ the woman said. ‘But to be honest, we don’t have as many books in it as we used to. They get damaged or borrowed and not returned, and we don’t replace them because everyone wants to use the internet now.’
‘Then how—’ Beatrice began. ‘What about old newspapers? From about the 1930s and 1940s?’
‘Those I can help you with.’ The woman smiled, stepping out from behind the desk. ‘Again, it’s all on computers now, but they’re actually simpler to use than the old microfiche system we had before. Let me show you.’
She led Beatrice up a flight of stairs and over to a bank of computers, eight of them arranged in two rows of four, wooden screens around them, padded metal-framed chairs standing in front of them. A welcome screen invited her to create a username and password.
Beatrice sat down, pulled the chair in towards the desk and typed in her email address, making up a random password she knew she’d forget straight away.
‘Now if you just click over there…’ The librarian’s blunt, unmanicured finger pointed at the screen. ‘And there, and again. That’s the archive. I’d recommend starting with the Evening News – it had the largest circulation of any London paper at the time.’
‘Okay,’ Beatrice said. ‘Thanks very much.’
Already, she felt daunted by the task ahead of her. The archive appeared on the screen as a list of years, bright blue Times Roman on a black screen. When she clicked on a year – might as well start with 1939 – a list of months dropped down, and those expanded into days. For each day, there was an early and a late edition of the paper, she discovered, clicking on a random date.
The front page of the newspaper appeared: a clear scan, which she realised she could zoom in and out of. The paper it had been printed on seemed to be an orangey-pink, the masthead an old-fashioned gothic typeface.
She scanned the headlines.
France Cancels All Army Leave
Mussolini Said to be Rushing Men to Spain
Gibraltar on Guard
And in the central column, which appeared to be devoted to lighter lifestyle stories, Enjoy the Sun While You May .
‘Jesus,’ she muttered. ‘Dark, or what?’
An arrow to the right of the screen took her to the opening spread of the paper, and she zoomed in again, distracted by an advertisement for chocolate bars and a headline about minimum payments for boxers.
It was all so alien it might as well have been printed in another language – or another world. And, she realised quickly, the task was hopeless. There were hundreds of issues of the newspaper for every year, each running to more than forty pages. Even if she only flicked through them, even if she restricted herself to the years around the Second World War, it would take her days and days to go through them all.
She didn’t have days and days. She had forty-five minutes each afternoon, and then only if she persuaded the children that ‘Rap and Rhyme’ was something they wanted to do every day – a long shot at best. Already, it had been half an hour since she’d left them.
Her chances of finding what she was hoping to find were about as good as they were of winning the lottery. And that was assuming she actually knew what she was looking for, which she didn’t really – not beyond confirming whether the house she was living in was actually the same house that had been owned by the Doyle family from Clonmara.
She navigated out of the newspaper archive and logged out of her newly created account, knowing there was no need to remember the password because she would never use it again.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ the librarian asked, smiling, as Beatrice passed the reception desk again.
She shook her head. ‘Not this time. But thank you for your help.’
When she returned to the children’s section – the small tables and chairs and brightly coloured books reassuringly normal – Slate and Parker were the only kids left; Beatrice felt a stab of guilt as she hurried over. Neil was squatting down, talking to them, the cheerful grin still on his face.
‘Here’s your mum now,’ he said.
‘I’m not their mum – just the nanny. Sorry I was late collecting them. I got distracted by the newspaper archive upstairs. I was looking for articles about Spitalfields before the Second World War.’
Neil stood up. He was very tall, all lanky legs and arms, with a shaved head and a neatly trimmed goatee beard. Beatrice guessed he was a couple of years older than her and wondered fleetingly why a young guy like him would choose to spend a summer afternoon wrangling a bunch of kids in a library.
‘You’re into local history, then?’ he asked. ‘You’d love my grandpa. He grew up around there. Well, the whole family on my dad’s side did, but he’s the oldest one still around. He worked as a cobbler, back when those old houses were leather workshops.’
‘He did?’ Beatrice hesitated. She could think of nothing she’d enjoy doing less than listening to the meanderings of some senile old man. ‘Actually, it’s not so much local history, although that’s part of it.’
‘Oh?’ Neil smiled. ‘I’m intrigued. Tell me more.’
Beatrice glanced down at Slate and Parker and saw that they were still happily ensconced on their plastic chairs, their heads together as they paged through a Curious George picture book. If only she had the ability to make the two of them sit quietly and focus that Neil appeared to possess.
She looked back at him. There was no reason for her to entrust him with the details of her personal life – details she’d kept hidden from the people she lived with and saw every day. But at the same time – he was a stranger. She didn’t ever have to bring the kids back here, ever see him again.
She lowered her voice and said, ‘The thing is… I’m adopted. I was born in Ireland although I grew up in the States. My dad was working out there at the time. And now I’m trying to find out more about what happened.’
‘To trace your birth parents?’ he asked gently.
‘That’s… well, my mother, mostly.’
Her father had always felt like a shadowy figure, sidelined by her compulsion to find the woman who’d given birth to her.
‘Why East London, though?’ Neil asked.
Hastily, seeing that the children had finished the book and were beginning to bicker about what to look at next, Beatrice explained about her time in Clonmara, which had yielded only the fragment of information about a big house in Spitalfields.
‘Wow,’ Neil said. ‘Sounds like you’ve got some detective work ahead of you. But hold on. There’s something I remember reading recently – we get newspapers from all over the world here, every day. They all get laid out on a table upstairs. The ones in Bengali and Urdu are the most popular, and I can’t read those but I love geeking out over the others.’
‘Go on,’ Beatrice urged impatiently.
‘They all get recycled at the end of the week,’ Neil continued, ‘but centrally, they’re digitised. I should be able to find the article, if you’ve got five minutes.’
‘Yes, please.’
He hurried off, and Beatrice crouched down with the children, trying to get them engaged in another book and reassuring them that they could go to the playground on the way home, now that the rain had eased.
‘Here you go.’ Neil returned, proudly bearing an A4 printout.
Beatrice almost snatched it from his hand. It was a good-quality scan, but the columns of newsprint were slightly askew on the page. At the top, she saw the running head of the Irish Times and a date from a couple of weeks earlier.
But the headline told her all she needed to know: National Adoption Contact Preference Register to Open .
‘Apparently you can write to them,’ Neil explained, ‘and tell them you’d like to make contact with your birth family. Only unless your birth family does the same thing, the request will just sit there on file. But it’s a starting point.’
Beatrice gazed at the words, amazed. It hadn’t occurred to her that something as prosaic as a change in the law, debated by a bunch of old people in whatever Congress was called over in Ireland, could hold the key to her past.
Seeing her face, Neil said, ‘I can send you a link to the article, if you like. In case you lose that.’
‘Yes. Yes, please.’ She gave him her email address and he jotted it down. ‘And it would be amazing to meet your grandfather, too, some time.’
She didn’t really mean it. The house seemed secondary now that she had this far better new avenue to explore. But gratitude to Neil made her generous.
‘I’ll give you my number as well, then.’ He smiled. ‘Let’s make a plan.’
She thanked him and said goodbye, then took the children’s hands in hers and led them out of the library. The sky had cleared, the pavements were sparkling and a rainbow arched high over the glass towers of Canary Wharf.
It’s a sign , Beatrice thought. It’s totally a sign.