Shadow Baby Read Free Page B

the contradiction which frightened her - first she had a grandmother (all she had) and then she didn’t and now she did again (only sometimes, only if asked) - but the mention of her life. What was a life? How could anything be worth more? But she merely nodded, as though she had understood, and said nothing.
    Evie, just turned five, was an expert at knowing when to say nothing. They were the first words she remembered, the first instruction - ‘Say nothing.’ She remembered being bundled into shawls and taken by Mary to the market and being told, ‘Say nothing, if anyone talks to you, say nothing, eh?’ She had obeyed, though it had not been difficult since all that the other butter women said to her was ‘Are you cold, pet?’ and ‘Are you hungry?’ and in both cases a shake of the head was sufficient. She sat on a little stool behind the old wooden bench that served as her grandmother’s stall and watched the people coming to buy. She was seated so low down, almost on the ground, that what she mostly saw were skirts and feet, an endless procession of long skirts and black boots. Seeking to see something more interesting and of greater variety she gave herself a crick in the neck, peering upwards so hard and earnestly at all the faces looming over her grandmother’s eggs. At the end of the morning, when she was carried to the cart and they trundled all the
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    long way back to Wetheral, she fell asleep and never saw anything of the return journey to the village.
    Those days, the days of going to market with her grandmother, were already a long way off in her young mind. She could only just recall the green in the village and the big houses round it and the plains above the river where they had lived. But she knew she had preferred it: that country life, and the presence of someone else, some other woman whose face she could not recall. All that had gone. Here, in the city, she stayed in the house almost all her time, with her grandmother. They went out to shop once a week to that same market where once they had sold flowers and eggs. On Sundays, the cathedral bells, so close by, vibrated through the house but she and her grandmother did not go to church. She had never, to her knowledge, in her short memory, been inside a church. She was sure she should go to church and did once suggest it but her grandmother told her there was plenty of time for her to be a churchgoer in the future if she wished. ‘Any road,’ Mary had said, ‘you’re baptised, you can rest easy, she saw to that at least, baptised, all proper, in Holy Trinity, does that satisfy you, eh?’
    It almost did. Evie knew where Holy Trinity was. It was the big church at the junction of the two roads in Caldewgate, outside the west wall of the city. She felt proud to have been baptised there and could see herself being held over the font and almost feel the holy water on her baby forehead. She longed to go into Holy Trinity and she resolved that one day she would indeed get inside the church and see the font. She had pictures and that was all. Her grandmother had a bible, even if she never went to church, and inside was a little illustrated booklet about Holy Trinity. One picture, very grainy, showed the font and a woman holding a baby and the vicar about to baptise it. Maybe the baby was her; she could at least pretend it was. But who, then, was the pleasant young woman holding her? Not her grandmother. There was a man in the picture too, standing a little behind the woman, his hat in his hand. Who was the man? Impossible to know, as most things were.
    ‘You’ve made a meal of that tea,’ Mary said. ‘Sup it up, there’s work to be done and half the morning gone. Get the tub, get that kettle back on, get the soap.’ Evie got everything. She had to drag the heavy tin tub along, it was too heavy to carry, but she managed successfully to position it under the tap in the yard. The yard was tiny, barely three feet wide and five feet long; and