Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster Read Free Book Online

questions that would surely follow. She wasn’t ready to lie so thoroughly yet, even though she had done so before. A new set of lies were needed and she had not got them ready. It was such a long time since she had held Shona, her baby, in her arms and had no doubts or qualms about a single thing - so confident she had been, once she was a mother, once she had been blessed. Archie could have accepted their lot, their destiny to be childless, but she never could have done so, never. She had had to have a baby, it had been vital to her sanity, not merely her happiness. Each time she was pregnant the glory of it transformed her. Each time she miscarried it was a tragedy of epic proportion. And the one stillbirth, the one baby she had carried to term, had made her want to die. She had tried to die. She wanted to be buried with her baby. And then there had been Shona.
    One day she would tell Shona everything. When her daughter was of an age to understand, when she had perhaps had children herself,
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    then would be the time to tell her. She would have no fears then, time and Shona’s growing-up would have dispersed them and she would be able to speak freely.
    They did not go again for a long time to stay with Grannie McEndrick. They were invited, in invitations that had an increasing edge to them, that were on the verge of becoming orders, but Catriona managed to be resistant to them. She pleaded her own poor health and there was nothing her mother could do about that except complain her daughter had never been really well since Shona’s birth. ‘It took it out of you,’ Ailsa McEndrick said when, instead of her daughter and granddaughter coming to visit her, she went to visit them (complaining all the way about the difficulties of the journey). ‘You were too weak after all those miscarriages, Archie should have had more consideration.’ ‘I wanted a baby,’ Catriona replied. ‘Oh. I know that? her mother said, ‘we all know that. But not at the cost of your own health. Look at you, stick-thin and no colour at all and think how you once were before.’ Catriona smiled. She’d been quite plump, she’d had a good complexion and her mother couldn’t forgive her for sacrificing both - as if weight and skin mattered beside the having of a baby. She would have offered up far more vital things to have one, her hair, her teeth, anything. But her mother couldn’t be expected to understand that kind of desperation. She had had four children and had often enough in Catriona’s childhood come near to implying this had been one, if not two, too many. Her first son had been born when she was only twenty and she had never experienced that craving for a child which had become her daughter’s own.
    Walking along the beach one rare still August day, Ailsa suddenly said, ‘You should have come home, you should have been looked after properly. That’s when it all started, when you were carrying Shona. You didn’t eat, I know you didn’t.’
    ‘Oh, Mother, don’t hark back, it was seven years ago for heaven’s sake.’ She didn’t look at her mother at all. They were side by side, keeping an eye on Skipper and on Shona, racing ahead along the edge of the sea. They walked a bit further until, with that violence for which it was famous on this part of the coast, the tide started to rush in over the flat ground forming deep gullies round islands of sand, and they shouted at Shona and the dog and veered sharply
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    inland, into the dunes. Ailsa was panting before she got over them and on to the track behind. ‘I’m getting old,’ she gasped, ‘I must be, I’m puffed after that wee hillock.’ But then she looked at Catriona and was so struck by her daughter’s pallor she stopped dead. ‘You’re not well,’ she said, her concern as ever coming out as an accusation. ‘What is it? What’s the matter with you?’
    It was tedious, this endless emphasis on how she looked, and Catriona resented it. Every time they