Elspeth and I sat for a while after the girls had gone inside to wash their hands, talking quietly about the days ahead. We agreed that the girls should see each other again soon, in the garden, with the same simple pleasures, lemonade and drawings and sticks for building houses. It felt like a promise worth keeping.
Chapter 25
— A Statement in Writing
Marlene came to see me on a quiet morning, without calling first, and she stood on my doorstep with her hands folded in front of her and her face pale. I had not seen her since the day she had arrived and told me about the adoption papers, and I could see at once that this visit had cost her something. She asked if she could come in, and I said yes, and Dolores made tea, and we sat at the kitchen table while Poppy played in the garden where I could see her through the window. Marlene did not waste time. She said she had come to put what she knew in writing, because Oliver had told her that a written statement would help, and because she wanted the truth to be clear before the hearing.
She told me again, slowly, what had happened on the night Veronica gave birth. Veronica had been young, and frightened, and the baby had come early, too early, and the doctors had said the little girl would need special care. Marlene had been there, holding her daughter's hand, and she had watched Veronica sign papers she barely understood, papers that said the baby would be adopted by another family. Marlene had signed them too, as a witness, because that was what the hospital had asked her to do, and because Veronica had been too weak and too frightened to do it alone. She had signed her name, and she had watched her daughter sign hers, and then the baby had been taken away to another room, and that was the last Marlene had seen of her granddaughter for six years.
I listened, and I did not interrupt, because I could see how hard it was for her to say these things out loud. She told me that Veronica had never spoken about the baby afterward, not once, not to her mother and not to anyone else as far as Marlene knew. She had gone on with her life as if that night had never happened, and Marlene had let her, because she had not known what else to do. She had thought, as mothers sometimes do, that silence would make the pain smaller. Instead, she said, the silence had made it grow, until it had become a fixation, a need to be close to a child, any child, and then to Poppy in particular, because Poppy was the same age her own lost daughter would have been.
Oliver had given Marlene a form to fill in, and she had brought it with her, folded in her bag. She laid it on the table between us, and I saw that she had already written on it in her neat, careful hand. She had written the date of the birth, as best as she remembered it, and the name of the hospital, and the fact that she had signed the adoption papers with Veronica. She had written that Veronica had known the baby was being adopted, and that no one had forced her to sign, and that she had understood, even in her fear, that she was giving her daughter to another family. She had written it plainly, without excuses, and she had signed her name at the bottom.
She asked me to read it, and I did. I read it twice, and then I handed it back to her, and she put it in an envelope and sealed it, and she wrote Oliver's name on the front. She said she would take it to him herself that afternoon, so that there would be no doubt about where it had come from. She said she was not doing it to hurt Veronica, because Veronica was still her daughter, and a mother did not stop loving her child because her child had done wrong. She was doing it because Poppy deserved the truth, and because Maisie deserved the truth, and because the court deserved to hear it from someone who had been there on that night.
Before she left, Marlene stood at the window and watched Poppy playing in the garden for a long time. Poppy was building a tower out of wooden blocks on the grass, and she was talking to herself as she worked, in the cheerful, busy voice she used when she was concentrating. Marlene smiled, a sad, tired smile, and she said Poppy looked like a happy child, and that was a good thing, and that was what mattered most. I told her I thought so too, and I thanked her for coming, and for telling the truth, even though it was hard. She nodded, and she picked up her bag, and she walked back down the path to her car, moving slowly, like a woman carrying something heavy that she had finally decided to set down.