A Scandalous Secret (6 page)

Waking up the day after her party, Sonya studiously avoided looking at herself as she went past the mirrored wardrobes to her bathroom. Day-old mascara was terrible – more panda than princess on the morning after!

She slipped off her nightshirt and examined the top half of her body critically. Tim had told her again last night that she had the perfect figure, trying to be romantic by snogging her under the stars and struggling to stick his clammy palm under her sari blouse, telling her how much he was going to miss her. But, in reality, there had been nothing romantic at all about that fumbling grope in the middle of a wet field stinking of manure. Sonya had finally shoved Tim away, put out by his sour beery breath and worried he would tread on the edge of her sari and get mud all over it. His eagerness to please was truly starting to irritate rather than endear. He had made such an ass of himself at the party too – he'd never been able to handle too much drink. When on a sudden impulse a few of the girls had piled into a car to go into Orpington town centre for ice creams, he had insisted on coming along. And then, instead of going into the ice-cream parlour, he'd stood outside, still dressed in his Roman toga and squirting startled passers-by with his plastic
sword that doubled as a water pistol. One elderly pensioner had been so enraged by the unexpected attack that he had chased Tim down the road, waving his brolly and shouting profanities until Tim had been rescued by an escape car full of giggling girls.

Sonya counted in her head while brushing her teeth. Tim had been her boyfriend for eight months now and, at first, Sonya had thought they were made for each other, both of them being clever and bookish and ardent followers of Man U. But lately (and she should admit that perhaps her unexpected four As and subsequent admission to Oxford had something to do with it), Sonya had started to find Timothy's adoration clingy and suffocating. She would probably upset Mum something terrible if she dumped him, however, as Laura had taken an early shine to Timothy's shambling diffident manner. She had always been a bit of a sucker for middle-class manners and speech too, all that mumbling and swallowing of consonants. ‘An accent snob, that's what you are, Mum,' Sonya was given to joke. ‘Oh, and a sucker for the starving millions! You don't need to feed him every day, you know. He's perfectly well-fed at his own house.' But the mere sight of Tim's thin, gangling frame entering their home seemed to set Laura off on a reforming mission into the kitchen, where Timothy had of late become a habitual visitor, treated to the Shaw household's typically robust and nutritious meals. ‘You may not think so now but this lad will make something of his life,' Laura Shaw often said soon after Tim had gone, sometimes adding darkly, as though reading her daughter's mind, ‘Do hang onto him, love – good boyfriends are like gold dust, you'll soon discover.'

Sonya towelled herself dry before she wandered back into her room and opened her wardrobe to find something
suitable for what promised to be a warm day. Was there a dress code for a dump-your-boyfriend-day, Sonya wondered, only half joking with herself. It was best not to look too scrummy, lest the dumpee's pain was thus intensified. And not too plain so as to cause no pain at all! Sonya shook her head. Perhaps she did not need to agonize so much over splitting up with Tim. It was very likely that his imminent departure for Durham University would finish things off between them anyway, the distance between Oxford and Durham being not inconsiderable for a pair of penurious students. But Sonya had always liked clear lines and stated intentions and the last thing she wanted was to skulk around avoiding Tim when it was so much easier to just tell him the truth.

Would she miss him at some point, Sonya wondered, hooking together her bra while staring at herself hard in the mirror, trying to induce some guilt. Then she shrugged her shoulders. Given the way Tim had whinged on about her going off to Asia with Estella, she thought not. And it wasn't even as if
he
presented a viable option! His delicate stomach had made him nervous of travelling abroad (a take-away from the Shalimar down the road invariably brought on the runs, from what he'd once let slip) and so Tim had never been seriously considered as a travelling companion for the two girls, despite both their parents suggesting it at some point. Besides, in a crisis, Sonya was sure that she and Estella would keep their heads a lot better than Tim ever would.

Twirling a pair of knickers on her forefinger, Sonya turned to examine her smooth, bare bum in the full-length mirror.
Hmmm … not bad at all
, she thought, finally recognizing – this recognition having come only well into her teens – how lucky she was to have her unusual golden
skin tone that never required the hours on sunbeds and pots of tanning cream that so many of her friends were slaves to. There were some advantages to being of mixed race. Someone at school had, in fact, recently told her that the blend of Indian and European was one of the best because Indian genes, being not as strong as African or Chinese, provided just the right element of exotica to balance out the normal pallor of Caucasian skin without taking over. Her hair was darker than the usual mousy English colouring for one, and her skin came out in what she now knew was a lovely light coffee by June. Dad, being Welsh, had darker aspects to him and it was only when they saw him that people who knew nothing of Sonya's adoption looked reassured. You could see their puzzlement at Sonya's long dark tresses and tanned skin, so starkly different from her mother's pale and rather washed-out blonde looks.

Sonya pulled on her knickers and a tee-shirt and looked more closely at her face again, searching – as she had been doing more and more of late – for traces of Indianness in her bone structure. Virtually everyone had complimented her on how beautiful she looked at last night's party and Sonya had even caught herself the other day leafing through one of those glossy Indian bridal magazines in WH Smith, looking at the models wearing heavy clothes and make up and searching for some kind of commonality. There was certainly something about her oval-shaped face and high cheekbones that set her apart from the average English look but, on the other hand, not a single model in the Indian magazines had eyes like hers: their startling shade of blue was far from exotic.

Sonya had always known about her Indian blood, of course: Meg Hawkins, her first social worker, told her in
as much detail as she was allowed at the time that her biological mother was of Indian origin and her biological father Anglo-Saxon. Although she knew very little further detail, Sonya had always imagined that her biological mother was the sort who lived somewhere like Southall or Tooting, a woman suppressed and cowed-down and forced into giving up her illegitimate but adored love child by a cruelly conservative family who hated the idea of a cross-cultural and mixed-race union. While she had briefly thrived on the drama of this storyline, that world seemed so alien to the cosy suburban English one in which Sonya had grown up that her curiosity (or, indeed, any desire at all to explore her roots) had been quelled many years ago.

And then she had met Chelsea. Or rather, met her again, since Chelsea had gone away to board after primary school. Sonya had always known that, like her, Chelsea had been adopted as a child, but they had never talked about this in any detail until they had bumped into each other at another old schoolmate's birthday party, just a couple of months ago. In the course of their conversation, Chelsea mentioned having traced her birth parents to a council estate in Merton, describing the sense of relief that had swept over her at knowing how lucky she had been to be adopted. For reasons she could not explain, the story had intrigued Sonya and led to her contacting the Registrar General after her own eighteenth birthday in order to have a look at her birth records. It had been a mere lark at first, some far-off niggling curiosity about her antecedents. She had even told Mum (and the adoption social worker who had provided the initial counselling) that, like Chelsea, it was only her medical history that she was interested in. But the information from the agency
that had arranged her adoption had taken Sonya completely by surprise, rattling her very foundations. Who would've imagined that her biological mother was a woman who lived in India, rather than Southall or Tooting, and – here was the really astonishing bit – that she had been a student at Oxford too, the very same university to which Sonya was due to go this autumn! It was not just the coincidence of this fact, but the idea that an educated woman had chosen to give her up that had been the really shocking thing to Sonya. Her birth mother was obviously one who'd had choices, not a suffering voiceless woman at all. Sonya could still recall the acrid taste in her mouth at that discovery, the shock and sudden hurt at the knowledge that she had not been prised away from her poor and defenceless mother's care by overzealous social workers, as she had always imagined, but had, in fact, coolly been given away. That was the really galling bit: that the woman who was her natural mother had made such a cold and deliberate choice, never turning around once to look back at the baby she had abandoned in England.

It was anger that was propelling Sonya on in this search, nothing else. Pure unadulterated anger. She had tried to reassure Mum and Dad of that fact but it seemed to bring them little comfort.

‘Sonya darling!' Sonya heard her mother's high-pitched voice float up the stairs.

Sonya opened her bedroom door to shout back. ‘Up here Mum. What's up?'

‘Dad's on the phone. He's in town and wants to know if you need one of those multi-plug thingies for your laptop.'

‘Okay, coming!' Sonya said, hastily pulling on a pair of
shorts before running down the stairs in long loping strides. It was best not to leave Mum with instructions on anything technical, Sonya thought as she took the handset off her mother. ‘Hey, Dad,' she said, clicking the speaker phone on.

‘Darling, you will need an adaptor to be able to use your laptop and hair dryer while you're abroad,' Richard Shaw's voice floated into the room. ‘I'm in Boots and can see some in the travel section. The one I'm looking at here – a multi-way plug – says “Thailand”, “Singapore” and … oh here, “India” among the list of countries so it should be all right. Apparently they use round-pin plugs in India.'

‘I hadn't thought of all that,' Sonya said, adding, ‘Thanks Dad.'

‘No trouble, darling,' Richard responded lightly. ‘Clever-looking thing, this, like a Rubik's cube except with buttons and pop-out pins on all the sides.'

‘Hope it's not expensive,' Sonya said, conscious of the fact that her parents had already had to lay out vast amounts on her holiday.

But her father's response was typically dismissive, ‘Naaaah, just a couple of quid.'

‘Aw, thanks. You home for lunch, Dad?'

‘Yes. Ask Mum if she wants me to pick up anything?'

Sonya looked enquiringly at her mother who was emptying the dishwasher, stacking plates in the cupboard above. Laura shook her head. ‘I went to the shops yesterday, we're all stocked up,' she said.

‘Think we're okay, Dad,' Sonya said into the phone. ‘Mum stocked up yesterday, which must mean we have supplies to last us till Christmas.'

Richard laughed before hanging up but Sonya saw that
her mother's face was unsmiling. She had been sulking on and off like this for days. It really wasn't like her to be so consistently down in the dumps. Realizing suddenly that it was uncharitable to describe Laura's distress as ‘sulks', Sonya walked across the kitchen, leaned over the open dishwasher and kissed her cheek loudly. ‘Cheer up, Mum,' she said, ‘I'm not going for good, am I?' To her horror, Laura's eyes filled with tears and, before Sonya knew it, her mother had turned away, shoulders shaking as she suddenly broke down. ‘Oh, Mum,' Sonya said, suddenly close to tears herself, ‘Don't cry, please. You've got to understand why I'm doing this. Please?'

‘But I can't, darling,' Laura sobbed, tearing off a strip of kitchen paper to wipe her eyes. ‘It may be stupid of me but I just can't understand why you would want to go on such a punishing quest. As it is, Dad and I would have been beside ourselves worrying about you being so far away. But somewhere like India! All that poverty and disease. And trying to find your natural mother? Why, Sonya? Have you lacked for anything at all in your life with us?'

‘Of course not, Mum!' Sonya cried. ‘Why would you even ask that?'

‘Then
why
?' her mother asked again, her tone anguished.

‘Mum, Mum,' Sonya responded, dodging around the dishwasher to take her mother's plump frame in her arms and squeeze her tightly. ‘It's so hard to explain but this has nothing at all to do with Dad and you. It's just something I need to do. For me. When Chelsea told me about her search, it made utter sense, you know. Even though what she found at the end of it was a squalid council flat and a smelly old couple. It was just something she needed to know – don't you understand?'

‘I'm trying,' Laura said, now looking mutinous through
her tears. ‘Chelsea may have made light of it but the whole experience must have been terribly traumatic at the time. And so unnecessary, especially given what a lovely family she has. I met them at least twice back in your primary school days and, really, they couldn't have been a nicer family. Anyway, how can this search for your birth mother be nothing to do with us? I feel as if we must have failed you in some way.'

‘Of course you haven't!' Sonya responded crossly. ‘But let me do this, please – Chelsea's parents did. You hear all the time of people going off in search of themselves, don't you? Well, it's something like that, Mum. It's been like a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Or a gap in my teeth that's annoyed and irritated me for years.'

‘But you always seemed so happy, so … so contented,' Laura cut in, ‘And we've told you everything we possibly could, everything we knew, Sonya.'