The Invisible Woman

I was left on a doorstep when I was a few hours old.  When I was a few hours old, I was left on a doorstep.  Fact.  Indisputable.  It was written down.  Left on a doorstep, it said.  The new-born baby was left, it said.  On a doorstep.

There's no quarrelling with facts, after all.

Of course, I have no recollection of the event.  At that age not a lot registers on the consciousness, although I have heard of people under psychoanalysis remembering even the moment of birth. The old man claimed to remember his birth that way: when he burst from darkness into light, from wet into dry, from togetherness into separation.

I don't know if he was really able to remember all that but they certainly say it is possible. And if I could remember my birth, could I then remember my mother's face?  Enough to recognize her again?  There's a question.  I only found out the known facts of my beginnings much much later, after I had been living for many years with the butcher and his wife.  Not, certainly not, under the impression that I was their own child, they never pretended that.  But nevertheless as a well-cared-for fosterling.

They put me in a west-facing bedroom, looking out over the neat back garden, the butcher's pride, towards wild skies.  The butcher's wife could never have suspected when she put up that pretty pink wallpaper, the grotesque faces I would imagine staring out at me from its beribboned bouquets of flowers as the sun sank behind the butcher's apple trees, throwing distorted shadows on the walls.

In those earliest days, under the bedcovers, I would see myself as the long-lost daughter of a queen, weeping in her tower for lack of me.  I had been taken.  A changeling, an ugly elf had been reared in my place and sat at the head of the table and married the prince.  I was an orphan, a refugee from an evil uncle who wanted to kill me to take my birthright.  For I was read to a lot: fairy-tales, the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and then I read for myself late, under the covers, The Princess and the Goblin, Peter Pan, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Enchanted Castle.  The bland, repetitive everyday life around me seemed as unreal as a painted façade covering a dark strangeness.

I would ask the butcher's wife about my mother.  The butcher's wife was a kind woman even though her hands were daily covered with the blood of slaughtered animals.  But if she ever knew anything, she never told me.  She would smile and say that sometimes circumstances made people give up their babies even though they loved them very much.  And Circumstances would appear to me out of the shadows as a monster with cruelly distorted features, standing over a beautiful maiden as she clutched her baby to her bosom.

My life has passed like a dream.  It is like looking down from a mountain on to a landscape that you cannot recognize, although you are told that you have traversed it, even though the marks of your footprints can still here and there be seen quite clearly.  Travelled so long and so far that you have difficulty in comprehending it and would deny the evidence if you could.

The butcher is dead.  His wife an old lady, clutching the sheets.  I am what they call middle-aged, even though I feel in the middle of nothing: either it is all over or it has not yet begun.  Others around me move and change so fast I cannot retain a precise image of them.  And my mother, my mother?

The bag I was in was an old floppy wicker shopping basket, one of the handles broken off and replaced with a hank of rope.  I was inside the bag, wrapped in a soiled white blanket stamped with little blue flowers.  How do I know?  Certainly I don't remember.  Certainly it is impossible for a five-hour-old baby to remember such a thing.  They must have told me.  Someone must have told me.  Yet the butcher's wife knew no such details, only that I was left on a doorstep and then found.  Not on her doorstep.  She only came into the picture much later, when a second foster-home was sought.  An unknown doorstep.  Well, unknown until I tracked it down.  But that was much later.  The memory of the basket and the blanket were already there.  The blanket ... I can see the frayed edge where the stitching has come undone ... I can feel the cheap quality of the man-made fibre.

So cunning of my mother.  As sure as I am of the basket and the blanket, I also know beyond a doubt that she chose the props on purpose, with great care to point to a certain conclusion that was, however, totally false.  Now that I have been on her trail for so long, I know a few things about her, even if her face remains obstinately blank.  A baby found on a doorstep wrapped in a soiled and cheap blanket and placed in an old shopping basket: there can be only one conclusion, can't there?  A poor young girl desperate to get rid of an unwanted baby, conceived in ignorance, born in an alley-way.  That's what the butcher's wife thought, though she wanted to protect me from it.  That's why she never supported me in my quest.  She thought it would lead to pain and sorrow.  Leave well alone, she thought, though too timid to say as much to one who had grown up to be so unlike herself, cosy and sure in her allotted place.

But I had read so many tales by then and found them false that I could not but doubt the slick evidence my mother had fabricated, even before I found how consistently she had covered her traces.  And there was, of course, the incident in the park.

I was eleven years old before I learned of the doorstep.  At an age when most children had long unmasked Santa Claus, I was still believing the fairy-tales of my own origins.  Not that fairy-tales are necessarily as remote from the truth as adults think.  Quite the opposite.  But still.  But still.

The butcher's wife's sister-in-law, that is to say, the sister of the butcher, a woman without blood on her hands, but nonetheless cruel, pretended that she assumed I knew.   I gaped, "A doorstep!"

"Oh, didn't they tell you?  Quite out of Dickens, I always think.  A doorstep!"

The butcher's wife was out in the kitchen, making tea.  A chosen moment.  The butcher's sister, glancing at the door, continued.

"That's why they didn't adopt you, Lucy dear.  They couldn't.  Your own mother might turn up at any moment and claim you."

Her laughter pealed out.  No doubt the butcher's wife, in the kitchen, rejoiced in her Christian heart to hear such fun.  She could hardly wait to share the joke.

I fainted.  My first blood had come, which explained matters satisfactorily to the butcher's wife.  While she fussed over me and pressed a pad between my legs, I shut my eyes, still dizzy, and saw my faceless mother advancing towards me, reclaiming me, carrying a battered wicker shopping basket and a soiled white blanket with blue flowers printed on it, frayed at the edges.  She picked me up, yes she did, easily, for I had shrunk like Alice after eating the right-hand side of the mushroom, wrapped me in the blanket and placed me carefully in the basket.  She set off walking, not like a mother about to dump a new child but like a woman carrying home the shopping, swinging it lightly in her hand, then shifting it to the other side to ease the weight.

"Lucy, Lucy," the butcher's wife whispered in my ear, kissing my cheek, "It's all right now, pet.  You'll feel better soon."

Years later fierce gratification mingled with natural pity when I learned of the mess the butcher's sister had made of her life.  Her marriage broken up following a nasty affair with the husband of a friend, she was repudiated by her children, took to drink and could no longer hold down her job.  Took to many men indiscriminately or maybe suicidally, looking out the worst on purpose, who knows.  Took to amphetamines.  She was finally retrieved by the butcher's wife.  Found at last, huddled on a door-step - not the door step, of course, that would have been too much - but one very like it.  Destitute, the bitter line of her mouth cracked, she was taken up and given the room that I had long since abandoned but which still contained my familiar marks, the sentimental and not entirely erroneous notion of the butcher's wife having been that I would like to find the room unchanged if I ever returned.  The indices in biro of my height at various ages on the eternally blossoming wallpaper.  The smear of blood from a nosebleed that woke me in panic from a nightmare one night.  The best of my earliest drawings, lovingly framed, always of tight little square houses with draped curtains and smoke coming from the chimneys, sometimes with a little round face peeping out of a window.  The secret corner of ripped wallpaper, under which I had written a cryptic message: Mutter.  The grotesque faces of my familiars.  In her convalescence, the butcher's sister covered them all over with paintings of daisies with black hearts.  She spent her days sewing black-hearted daises on to her clothes.

I never called the butcher's wife mother or mammy or mam or ma.  I never called her by her name, whatever it was.  I called her aunt.  She was in fact not modern enough to be relaxed if a child should address her by her first name.  And she felt, conscientiously, that she couldn't let me call her mother in case my real mother (the bitter laughter of the butcher's sister rings in my ears) ever did come back to reclaim me.  So it was "aunt," even though there was no - I assumed then, I know now for sure - blood link between myself and either the butcher's wife or the butcher himself.

As for the butcher, I never felt comfortable with "uncle," so I ended up not calling him anything on the few occasions in those early years I ever had of talking to him.  Why had he let me come into the house?  It seemed it could only be for his wife's sake.  His own children, two sons, were almost reared and he certainly would happily have left it at that.  His wife, however, was, in her late thirties, at a loose end, a kindly, child-loving, good-doing woman who yearned, too late it seemed, for a daughter.  My story was pathetic, sentimental.  There was even an element of tragedy.  Probably the butcher's wife would have preferred to adopt me, hug all the separateness out of me and have me call her mammy, but this, according to the laws of the times, could not be.  And the butcher, a man of excessively conventional views, could not warm to a child not of his own flesh.  So for the sake of his wife I was countenanced but never loved by him.  Now I think that it was partly his early attitude that made me stay a stranger in my second foster-home.

The boys, the butcher's two sons, whom I never knew well until I moved from the house long after they themselves had gone, would tell me I was lucky not to have known my parents.  The children of suppressive parents often say this to me and to a certain extent I can understand their point of view.  I would not have liked the butcher or even his wife as parents, though to me they were almost always polite.  I cannot criticize them except to say that they were ordinary to a fault.  The butcher had expectations of his sons which they were careful not to fulfil.  Neither went into the family business.  The younger turned vegetarian within my memory and enormous and numerous were the rows at the dinner table.  The butcher's wife tried to cook him tasty little dishes with cheese or beans but the butcher threw them out and let his son eat only potatoes and vegetables.  This was at a time when many people still ate a lot of meat and to be vegetarian was to be an oddity.

But apart from this one deviation, the younger son stayed a pillar of respectability, becoming an expert on weather, marrying a nice girl and having several mannerly vegetarian children.  It was the elder son who created the heartbreak.  And me, of course.

Have I been wrong about so many things?  Is it possible?