Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster Read Free Book Online Page B

mind at all that he was on the periphery of their relationship for so much of the time. Catriona had what she wanted and he wanted what she wanted, simple as that.
    He watched them sometimes without their knowing. Especially at first, when they came to this carefully chosen village on the northeast coast, when they were settling down and he was still anxious about Catriona’s mental well-being. He would stand outside the bedroom door, hidden in the shadows, and watch through the gap his wife nursing the baby. She couldn’t breast-feed, but she wanted to pretend that she did and so she sat with her blouse undone and the baby nestled close against her empty breast, and the bottle of milk tipped so close to her own nipple that it grazed it and the baby fidgeted, fighting the natural nipple off to get at the satisfying rubber
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    teat. It moved him to see this scene; but it disturbed him, though he was not quite sure why. Catriona carried things too far. She had her baby, why did she need to convince herself she was feeding it? Why was this subterfuge important to her? Was she doing it for the baby’s sake or her own, and if for her own what did it mean? But Archie asked none of these questions; he only observed and left his wife to it.

Chapter Three
    EVIE WAS a hard worker. It was what everyone remarked on - such a hard and willing worker, for a small child, with a real idea of how jobs should be done. Give her something to clean and she’d go at it as though her life depended on it, scouring dirty old pans as if expecting it to be possible that through her efforts they could be restored to their former shining selves. It was assumed by those who gave her the work to do in the Home that she had had a hard taskmaster, or mistress, that perhaps she had been bullied and beaten into such diligence. But no. When questioned as to her past, and Evie did not speak of it unless she was directly asked, she had only words of affection for her dead grandmother. She had wanted to please her, and hard work was what had given her most pleasure, both the doing of it herself, when she had been able, and seeing Evie being like her, her exact copy.
    Except Evie never forgot she was not, could not be, such an exact copy. The woman who had been her grandmother was not her grandmother; nor was Mary the mother of the woman who had been Evie’s mother. This was too complicated to explain so she never attempted any explanation. It hurt her even to remember this truth and to find it would not disappear. She had the tin safe, of course. It had gone first into the bag when the policeman stood over her, and when she came to the Home she had managed to hide it inside one of her thick woollen stockings. There was nowhere for her to put her few belongings, except the communal chest of drawers at the end of the dormitory she shared with eleven other girls, but it worried her so much, thinking of other hands finding and handling her precious tin box, that she could not bring herself to place it in any of those capacious drawers without hiding it first inside a stocking. She
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    thought of keeping it under her pillow instead, as she had been used to doing, but that was not safe either. Girls stole things and hid what they had stolen in or under the pillows, and so these were regularly inspected. Nor could she keep it in her apron pocket - it made a bulge and would be remarked on. There was nothing for it but to ask Matron to keep it for her, a solution far from satisfactory and one she had to be driv en to after several days of feverishly moving the tin around.
    Matron was rarely seen by the girls in the Home, but she was always known to be there, a formidable presence in the background, built up into an ogre by the rest of the staff. It was a big Home, St Ann’s, housing at any one time a minimum of sixty and a maximum of a hundred girls between the ages of five and fifteen. It was meant to be a place of safety for orphaned or abandoned girls,