The Fish Ladder (28 page)

In the clinical day room I began the long wait of blood tests and examinations, weights and measurements, while my customised drugs were mixed and prepared and a canula fixed into my arm. My friend Tessa arrived before the drugs did. Rupert waited at home to look after Evie. Tessa appeared not to notice the women without hair, the women with open sores, the woman whose face had turned metallic green, the woman who would die within the month. She brought me grapes and started eating them, and then laughed and gave them to me. This wasn’t a place where we had ever thought to meet. Over the weeks I learned to accept the kindness of our friends. My sister-in-law Jane took me shopping for daffodil and tulip bulbs so that I would have something to look forward to after the winter. My brother and his family took Evie on holiday. Her godfather Calvin flew from New York. He took us to shows in the West End and brought a blue fox-fur hat to keep my bald head warm and a pair of chocolate-coloured UGG boots for Evie. My friend Rob sent the manuscript of his new book and invited me to give him notes. In thanks for these he gave me a map of Buttermere, marked up in his oddly angular hand, blue ink illuminating valleys and rivers, ridges, places to retrieve my strength. My friend Clare spent two weeks in our home so that Rupert could carry on writing. She cooked, shopped, cleaned, organised the Voewood Festival, and ran her literary agency from our living room. Rupert’s brother, Robin, planted roses in the front of our house and his agent, Peter, sent us a hamper that lasted for weeks. And Rupert. Rupert folded his life about me. He brought me books and fresh flowers, and hid his fear behind laughter. When I panicked at the thought of dying surrounded by someone else’s wallpaper he painted our bedroom a pristine white. He kept Evie close by his side, walked with her to school every morning, and collected her every afternoon. He cared for me, cared for both of us, steadfastly. Since her own illness Mum was, for the most part, unable to remember that I was unwell, and this made me happier than I could say. Although, during one brief moment of clarity, she had looked at me, and said:
You’ll be all right. I can feel it in my waters
.

On my first day in hospital I had been asked if there was a history of breast cancer in our family. I explained that I had been adopted, and didn’t know. But as the months shunted into one another, and the year turned around, and again became summer, the question of a family medical history appeared again. For the first time it occurred to me that the reason I had never found my birth mother was because she might have died. My friend Caradoc was also an adoptee. He had written a thoughtful memoir about his experience, called
Problem Child
.

‘Why don’t you talk to Ariel?’ he said. He had taken me to lunch at Sheekey’s Restaurant, a treat before I left for Wales with Evie. Ariel was the social worker who had helped reunite Caradoc with his own lost family. He rang her on my behalf. The next day, I spoke to Ariel. There were necessary protocols, like proving who I was, and notifying the relevant local authority, but Ariel gave me her assurance that she would rush these through as efficiently as she was able, given the state of my health. I gave her the information that was recorded on my birth certificate, as well as the name of my birth mother’s husband, which I knew from their marriage certificate. Shortly afterwards I met with Ariel. I sat on a sofa in her cool white room and glanced at the piece of paper that she had put in front of me. On it was the name, date of birth and address of my birth mother. She had been on the electoral register all along. As were two half-brothers.

I don’t know why I hadn’t seen her. It seemed ridiculous how easy it had been. When I got back home I replicated the search myself, and found my birth mother in seconds. She lived about a two-hour drive from where I had grown up. I realised, suddenly, obtusely, bizarrely, that I had only ever looked for her under her maiden name. I couldn’t believe, hadn’t wanted to believe, it had never even occurred to me – that a marriage that took place on the condition that I was given up could succeed.

It had succeeded. Her marriage had lasted forty years but now her husband, the man I believed had turned me out, was dead. Ariel wrote a letter to her. At the last minute I panicked. I had the strongest feeling that this might be my only chance to communicate with my mother directly. I told Ariel that I wanted to write to her myself. But Ariel reassured me that it was better this way, that the news would come as a shock, and it was kinder to use an intermediary, and I could see this, so I agreed to it. So Ariel wrote to my birth mother to say that she was researching the genealogy of a client, and had reason to believe that we were related. She included the date, and place, of my birth, along with the name on my birth certificate.

Severn

Evie and I decided to make a pilgrimage to the source of the River Severn. What had started as a holiday project now lingered as a habit. It was two years ago that I had followed the Dunbeath Water. No longer just a reason for a journey, the rivers had evolved into a metaphor. Each body of water plaited with the next, twisting first into a bubbling thread, and then into a silver rope. When viewed on a map of Britain and Ireland these ropes formed a net, or a ladder. When I was out walking, the waters became my guide, companion and teacher. They marked a border between different states of being: solid, liquid, air. And they kept moving, were – quite literally – defined by their movement. Heraclitus said that ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice, because it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ Woman. Wherever I went, I sought them out, and it seemed fitting that the longest river in Britain should rise just a few miles from my birth mother’s house.

Evie and I had been staying at the cottage over the summer holiday. Rupert stayed in London to work. Ariel had still not had a reply to the letter she had sent, but I had noticed that our route back to London passed very close to my birth mother’s village, which in turn was near the source of the River Severn. We had booked into a pub in the village of Montgomery. We would visit the source of the river the following day. But when we passed the sign for my birth mother’s village we giggled, wondered if we should take a look, decided against it, drove twice round a round­about, and then up and down the same stretch of dual carriageway, before finally pulling into a lay-by and doubling back on ourselves. We decided to make the detour. She lived in an almost inconsequential village that we missed the first time we passed through it. Her house was at the outer edge of the settlement. The door was at the side, which meant we couldn’t see it. The curtains were drawn, although it was afternoon. In the garden was an American-style mailbox. A ticking anxiety circled inside me as finely calibrated as a Hornby train set. She was in there, behind the door that we couldn’t see. I was sure of it. I felt drunk. A notice in the window said:
Say No to Wind Farms
. The previous summer I had been invited to speak at a public inquiry into a proposed wind farm. A car was parked in the drive, and it was the same make as my own. This woman was familiar to me, even from the scant evidence that was visible of her day-to-day life. She spoke to me in a way that I had never experienced. I could feel a hum of recognition. Three generations of women were within a few yards of one another. But one of them didn’t know it. I wondered if she could feel our proximity.

No one went in or out. Evie and I couldn’t stop laughing, although I don’t know why. Nerves, I suppose. We discussed what we would do if my birth mother appeared, wondered if we should come back with flowers, and chocolates, and pretend to be Interflora. I was conscious of my boyish hair, only just returning after the months of chemotherapy. I made myself imagine the possibility that, before the end of the week, we might be returning to this very place, and being welcomed into the house as guests.

Alice Oswald had written a poem called ‘A Sleepwalk on the Severn’. A part of it was called: ‘mother’, and two lines kept recurring to me as I looked at the silent house.

I am waiting for an old frayed queen

To walk to that window:

So was I. The River Severn (Welsh:
Hafren
, Latin:
Sabrina
) takes its name from the ghost of a little girl, murdered by a bitter queen, who killed her husband and then drowned both his mistress and their love child in the river. The child’s name was Hafren. After the drowning, the queen permitted the little girl’s name to be given to the river. When the Romans came they Latinised it – Sabrina – and honoured the child as a goddess. I thought the lines of the poem must refer to the queen of the story. But the River Severn was also one of fourteen rivers that came into being when Boand upset the Well of
Wisdom, and I wondered if the stories might be connected. They were both about illegitimate children.

No one seemed to be coming into, or going out of, the house. We decided to check into our pub.

The next morning we drove past a dammed-up lake through soft green land, which grew greener, and greyer, as it rose. After a while we came to a wooded area with a circular car park and a Portakabin loo. There were some moss-covered wooden sculptures that looked as though they had been made with a chainsaw. Plastic containers indicated the place where leaflets or maps had been stored. Wooden stairs descended into woodland, and there was a slipway for wheelchair users and pushchair access. A number of wooden posts, with different-coloured collars, indicated the choice of footpath one might take. One of them showed a drawing of a young woman with flowing hair and a medieval gown. Stars encircled her head.

‘Look, Evie,’ I said, ‘that must be Sabrina.’

I had told her the story of the jealous queen, and the drowned child immortalised by the river. How the Romans made little Hafren into a goddess.

‘That’s like trying to make something good out of something horrible,’ Evie said. ‘How come she is grown-up in the picture?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s not her.’

The Severn appeared, a flash through the trees, quite wide and flowing fast, amber water over slabs of rock. In a short space of time it became very straight, with coppiced woodland along the opposite bank, and it felt vulnerable, exposed, naked in its canal-like straightness. There was very little sound; low cloud cover muted the river. What birdsong there was seemed to come from far away. A plastic chain-link footpath, brightly coloured, of the sort that are found on golf courses, paved the bank on our side. Every so often there were benches. We caught up with a party of walkers, dressed as though they’d been out for Sunday lunch, incongruous on the woodland trail. We almost stepped on a frog.

The land began to rise, through deeper woodland, quite quickly, and the river narrowed suddenly. It meandered, and so did we.

‘It’s like bees,’ Evie said, ‘a tail made out of bees!’

In the past, when we had walked, Evie had been the one to slow down, to reach for my hand to help her. But it was me, now, who followed slowly, me who fought to catch my breath. I had still not recovered my strength from the months of treatment. I had been weakened by chemotherapy, my heart had been affected, and I had had extensive surgery just a few weeks before the summer holidays began, designed to reduce my risk of developing further primary breast cancers. I still had limited use of both my arms, and my stamina returned as slowly as my hair. Every so often I had to stop and rest while Evie ran ahead. She stood on a boulder and waved down at me, threw two sticks into the current, one for each of us, and then raced downriver after them. If they got caught she leaned across the flow, poking until the blockage span free. After a while she found a longer branch, which she stripped of tiny twigs, and this she gave me to use as a walking stick. I took it, happy, grateful for its help. Joint pain was an unexpected side effect of hormone therapy, or perhaps a consequence of a chemically induced menopause. Whatever the cause, in medical terms, the practical consequence was that my feet, knees, hips and spine protested with every step.

We came to a dirt road. On the other side the river narrowed sharply. The way-marked footpath became a well-trodden track next to the stream. White mist drifted like dragon’s breath. Our faces were misted in droplets. They filled our eyelashes and beaded our hair. Evie put her hands to her face:
It’s so cold!
I couldn’t feel it, because my face was numb, and remains so to this day. Another of the side effects of treatment. But I recognised, from my journey to Dunbeath, the proximity of the waterhead.

As the land rose and the source of the river grew closer the footpath became boggy and wet. Great stone slabs had been set along the path and for once I didn’t complain at the intervention. I wouldn’t want to walk out across this moor without very concrete guidance. Suddenly, the stream opened out into a high-sided, bean-shaped black lagoon. A post next to the footpath announced the source of the River Severn. I had that same feeling, of staring into primordial soup, that I had experienced at the hole in the ground at Dunbeath. But this hole was the size of a swimming pool. It was walled around by collapsing peat hags. The river flowed quickly, even from this place. I was amazed that it began with such strong purpose.

Evie looked into the pool, but she too seemed perplexed by it. White mist curtailed the view, although a dim path was visible across the moor. The source of the River Wye was just a few miles away. I wondered if the footpath led to it. But that wasn’t what we’d come to do. ‘Let’s go back,’ Evie said. Alice Oswald’s poem again returned to me: