Chapter Thirty-Eight
There was an image Evelyn couldn’t get out of her head: a circle of prams arranged on a lawn and well-dressed couples strolling from one to the next, peering inside.
Was the baby pretty enough? The right colouring?
The gender they wanted? It was obscene, yet this had been a practice at the mother and baby home she’d read about.
Had Evelyn been one of those babies, picked out by Edwin and Elsbeth Silver, who had made up the foundling story to conceal her true origins? Or, if the foundling story was true, had her mother given birth in St Agnes and then left her baby somewhere like a church porch?
The bus stop was opposite the parish church and, telling herself she just wanted to get out of the rain, she walked up the path to the hefty wooden door.
Church had not been a part of her childhood Sundays – science trumped religion in the Silver household – but the cool interior immediately reminded her of school carol services, harvest festivals and St Piran’s Day.
She gazed up at the ceiling timbers that looked like an upturned boat, then down at the wooden parquet flooring, which had been recently polished.
This was foolish, she told herself, but just as she turned to leave, a jolly voice called out from the darker depths of the church, ‘Oh, you’re early.’
Looking left and right, Evelyn wondered if she could still make her escape.
‘But I always think early is better than late.’ The voice came again, then footsteps and a rotund woman wearing a blue V-neck sweater with a dog collar emerged from the gloom.
‘Hello, I’m Carol.’ The vicar held out her hand. ‘Welcome to St Agnes.’
This was clearly a case of mistaken identity, but Evelyn instinctively liked Carol.
‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘I’m Evelyn – and probably not who you were expecting.’
‘Oh.’ Carol cocked her head to one side. ‘Not my ten o’clock flower arranger then?’
‘Sadly not.’
‘Well, welcome anyway.’ Carol gestured around her. ‘Feel free to sit for a while.’
Succumbing to a wave of tiredness, Evelyn eased herself into a pew and let her head drop forward, a move that Carol mistook as an act of supplication and she came and knelt beside her. ‘Let us pray.’
Sounds from outside drifted in: the distant peep-peep of a delivery van reversing, the gentle rustle of leaves and the chatter of birdsong. After what Evelyn hoped was a sufficiently pious interval, she cleared her throat.
‘I should be getting on.’
‘Of course.’ There was a pause. ‘Unless there’s anything else?’
Oh there was more, so much more, but it was hard to know where to begin. ‘I’m not from around here,’ she said eventually. ‘But I wonder if my mother might have stayed in the village for a while. A long time ago.’
Carol continued looking ahead and rested her hands in her lap. ‘We haven’t had a visitor like yourself for a while,’ she said. ‘Each time someone comes, I think it will be the last. Every story is different, but all of them are heart-breaking.’
There was a relief in not having to explain it all from the start. ‘I’m not certain that I was born there, though,’ she said. ‘It’s unconfirmed. It’s complicated.’
‘It often is,’ Carol said. She had curly hair that surrounded her head in a mousy halo and dimples formed in her round cheeks when she smiled. She reached into the front pocket of her slacks, brought out a tube of extra strong mints and offered one to Evelyn.
‘The church didn’t run the home, but it was not blameless.
The girls came every Sunday, marched through town in a crocodile and then were made to sit on their own.
From what I gather, some villagers were sympathetic, but not all.
’ Carol popped a mint into her own mouth and Evelyn heard a dull crunching. She worried for Carol’s molars.
‘What year are we talking about?’
‘I was born in 1964, the year it closed. I suppose I’ve come looking for a record of my arrival.’
Evelyn was picturing herself as a bundle of blankets, laid inside the church, but Carol misunderstood her.
‘Sadly, this might not be the best place to look for baptism records. Plenty of babies were born in this village, but they were often baptised elsewhere. If the mother kept her baby, that would be back in her home parish. If the baby was adopted, it would be wherever those parents lived. Either way, that could be out of county.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Lots of the girls that came to St Agnes weren’t from Cornwall. If a girl in, say, Manchester or Bristol got in trouble, it was easier if she disappeared to a place where no one knew her.’
‘I see.’
Carol patted her leg. ‘But let’s have a look, hey.’
This made Evelyn curious, so she followed Carol to a corner of the church, where she saw shelves of books and several plastic crates of toys.
‘Toddler group at eleven,’ Carol explained and unlocked a tall wooden cupboard.
Standing on tiptoe, she talked to herself.
‘OK, 1964 . . .’ She ran her finger along the spines of the leather-bound books and tugged one down. ‘Here we go.’
Carol opened up the ledger for 1963–5. Evelyn saw handwritten rows of names and the date of each baptism. All the records for 1964 were in the same italic script and bore the same signature. She pointed at it and looked hopefully at Carol.
‘The late Father Harris, I’m afraid. His successor was Father Lane, also passed. I came here ten years ago and I expect I’ll be referred to as “the new lady vicar” for another ten or more.’
There was a temptation to turn the pages more slowly, putting off the moment when there was the smallest chance her own name might appear. She saw an Edith, two Margarets, an Alice and a Nora, but no Evelyn. She had reached January 1965 when Carol looked over her shoulder.
‘You’ll notice that the dates of baptism are often a while after the date of birth, so don’t panic if you don’t see anything around your birthday. That’s if you know the date?’
‘The only date I have is the day when I was given up by my mother, which was in December 1964. I suppose I might have been born earlier. I was a foundling, you see.’ She gave a small, embarrassed laugh. ‘I almost wondered if I was left here. On the steps of this church.’
Evelyn got out her phone and showed Carol a photograph of her lace.
‘This was pinned to my blanket, like an old-fashioned identifier.’ Then Evelyn stopped talking because she didn’t want to cry, not here in a church, with a nice lady vicar she barely knew.
‘That is a very lovely piece of lacework,’ Carol said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I doubt very much that you were left in this church. If that story is true, it must have been somewhere else.’
‘Why?’
‘A foundling, well, it’s the sort of thing that I’d have been told when I arrived.
It would have been part of the church’s history, plus social services would have been called in and there would have been reports.
But most of all, someone in the congregation would know, because things tend to stick in locals’ memories a long time,’ Carol said.
Then she added with a wink, ‘If I tell you there remains a long-running rumour about who stole the communion wine in the Christmas of 1969, you’ll get the picture. ’
There was a knock at the door. ‘I’m sorry, that’ll be my ten o’clock. Wedding flowers.’
‘It’s OK, I think I’m done.’ Evelyn sighed.
‘Don’t give up,’ Carol said. ‘Lots of people do DNA tests these days and find their birth family that way. I’m guessing your adoptive parents are . . .’
‘Yes, gone. And they were never big sharers, anyway. The most my mother said was, “And then we were three.”’
‘And your father?’
‘I’m learning that he lied as easily as he breathed,’ she said bitterly.
Carol saw her to the door. ‘I hope you find the answers you need.’ She reached for Evelyn’s hands. ‘But whatever did happen, you can be sure that your mother loved you. It wouldn’t have been her choice to give you up and she didn’t forget you.’
Evelyn looked down at Carol’s clean, smooth hands and thought how nice it would be to lead a life where you felt cool certainty instead of raging self-doubt.
Evelyn’s business here was done. It was still possible that her mother had given birth in St Agnes, but she could have hailed from anywhere – Norwich or Swindon or London – and returned home after her baby was born.
A small scrap of lace had never been enough to find her.
As the bus back to Truro swerved around the tight corners and wet branches scraped against its windows, darker thoughts began to form in her mind.
Her father had spun so many tales over the years: that he was a respected academic, that the boxes in her museum contained worthless donations and that he’d never canoodled in Rules with Frances Parfait.
For all Evelyn knew, he could have found that scrap of lace at an antiques fair, paid pennies for it and turned it into another tall tale for his own entertainment.
She’d treasured that fragment of lace, seeing it as a thread connecting her to her past. But now its strands were fraying, attached to nothing, and Evelyn felt as if she was coming apart too.