Child on the Doorstep. Anne Bennett
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morning. However, none of the suits she’d seen were like the one the young man had on, nor were they worn in the same way. Her neighbours often looked uncomfortable in their suits, encased some of them seemed, but this young man wore his suit as easily as if he wore one every day.
All this Connie took in in an instant, and the young man was fair dazzled by Connie’s smile, which she bestowed on him as she said, ‘Can I help you?’
The young man wasn’t half as self-assured as he appeared. He wasn’t at all sure he had got the right address and he said a little hesitantly, ‘I need to speak to a Mrs Angela McClusky.’
That took the wind right out of Connie’s sails, for it had been the last thing she had expected him to say, and she wondered what such a person would want with her mother.
The man, seeing her reaction, said, ‘Have I come to the right place?’
‘Oh yes, that’s my mother,’ Connie said.
‘Who is it, Connie?’ Mary asked from her chair by the fire.
‘Someone to see Mammy,’ Connie told her and to the young man she said, ‘You’d best come in. My mother is in the cellar, I’ll tell her you are here.’
The young man thanked her and stepped into the room. Connie made for the cellar steps as Mary swung round in her chair.
‘Come nearer,’ she said, for her eyes weren’t as good as they once were. The man hesitated and then took a step forward. ‘Closer than that,’ Mary said. ‘I can’t see you from there.’ And as the man took another step so Mary could see him clearly he started with shock when Mary burst out, ‘Almighty God. You’re Stan Bishop’s son, aren’t you?’
The man was a little shaken and he said, ‘How … How do you know that?’
‘Because you’re the spit of him, lad,’ Mary said. ‘Your father was a fine-looking man and you look just like him. Angela will get a shock too. You’d better take a seat.’
He sat on the edge of the settee but when Angela came into the room a few minutes later he rose again and Mary was impressed he had been brought up with such good manners. The words dried up in Angela’s mouth when she saw the young man in front of her. Memories of his father, Stan Bishop, came flooding back. He had been her husband’s best friend and a friend to her too – she missed him almost as much as her husband. She was almost in shock at seeing the young man in front of her. When Connie had described the man, she presumed he was after money and she wondered how quickly she could get rid of him, but her heart gave a jolt for it was as if the years had fallen away and she were looking at Stan again.
‘You’re Daniel Swanage,’ she said. ‘Stan Bishop’s son.’ Realising he had stood up at her entrance, she sat down in the armchair and said, ‘Please sit down. You are the last person on earth I expected to see.’
Daniel sat on the settee as before, as Connie followed her mother into the room. She had heard her mother’s words and her first thought was that Stan Bishop was the name of the man her grandmother had told her about just a few weeks before and she said to her, ‘Granny, you told me about a man called Stan Bishop, but you never said he had a son.’
‘I didn’t think you’d ever need to know.’
Connie ignored that and said to the man directly, ‘And how can your name be Swanage if your father’s name is Bishop?’
‘Daniel was adopted after his mother died,’ Angela said. ‘His aunt and uncle adopted him and their names were Betty and Roger Swanage.’
‘Yeah,’ Daniel said, and the bitterness of his tone was at odds with the hurt Angela could see reflected in his grey eyes. ‘Your grandmother was right,’ he said to Connie. ‘My real father never had a son because he gave me away and then forgot all about me.’
Angela’s heart constricted in pity for the man who had presumably just found out about the existence of his father. She knew, though, that the hurt Daniel was feeling was nothing like the betrayal her own younger daughter would feel as she grew up, for Angela hadn’t left her in the loving arms of an auntie, but completely alone on the workhouse steps. She had thought the guilt would ease as the years passed, but in fact it had increased as the child had grown older and Angela knew her daughter would now be aware of being a foundling that no one even cared about.
To cover her emotions, she got up and filled the kettle and put it over the fire, getting cups out of the cupboard in the cubby hole of a kitchen. Mary had been a little surprised by Angela’s silence till she caught the preoccupied look in her eyes and knew she was thinking of the abandoned child. And so before the silence became uncomfortable, she said, ‘Your father never forgot you, Daniel. He gave you up because he had to.’
Angela swallowed the lump in her own throat and pushed her own sorrowful memories away because she felt it important to set the record straight as far as Daniel was concerned.
‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘I knew your father well and cared for him a great deal and what he did, signing away his rights to you, he did for your sake. Look around this area and think what your life would have been like if he hadn’t have done that. Your home would be a house very like this and in this area. Your father had to work so you would probably have been left in the indifferent care of some slattern, who might have had no thought of you other than as a way to earn easy money.’
‘Angela’s right,’ Mary said. ‘It hurt Stan greatly to sign all rights to you away. I know because I was there. I was with your mother when she was in labour giving birth to you and a kinder, finer woman never walked this earth and your father loved the very bones of her. She was everything to him and when she died, your father was beside himself. He had no idea what to do. It was a tragedy a young woman should be taken like that and your father was grateful for Betty who came and cared for you from when you were a few hours old.’
‘I think that’s really sad,’ Connie said. ‘It must be awful to grow up without a mother.’
Connie’s words were like a dagger in Angela’s heart and yet she said to Daniel, ‘Has Betty just told you all this?’
‘She won’t tell me anything,’ Daniel said. ‘Even now she won’t. It was the man at the bank. See, I was twenty-one in April and the bank contacted me. Apparently my mythical father had left money in the bank for me to have when I was twenty-one if he didn’t survive the war. As they hadn’t heard from me – well they wouldn’t, seeing as I knew nothing about it – they asked me what I wanted to do with it. Along with the money was a letter and in the letter it said he was my father and the money was mine to do with as I pleased.’
‘That must have been a shock if you had not been told about the adoption.’
‘I’d been told nothing,’ Daniel said. ‘And the letter was a far greater shock than the money, though there’s over two hundred and fifty pounds he has left for me. What threw me completely was that he continued to add to the account until 1918, which must have been when he died. I could have written him. Hell, I could have seen him before he enlisted, got to know him a bit, but he obviously didn’t want to do that.’
‘Daniel, he did,’ Angela said. ‘Look at the money he put on one side for you, the letter he sent.’
‘What’s a letter?’ Daniel said, disparagingly. ‘Even money is easy enough to give if you have enough to spare and letters are just words on a page. It’s guilt money as far as I’m concerned.’
For a moment Angela considered leaving Daniel thinking that. It was important that he still got on with his adoptive parents, for that’s all he had, and their relationship already appeared to be somewhat strained. Whatever he thought of Stan couldn’t hurt him now.
But she couldn’t do it, she had to put Stan’s side of the story. And so she said, ‘Daniel, your parents Betty and Roger cannot have children of their own and that has been a great cross for them to bear. I believe she suffered multiple miscarriages, didn’t she, Mammy?’
‘She