‘I heard you come in,’ she said. ‘You’ve made tea.’
‘Have you got a five o’clock?’
‘No. I should have, little Sally Wright, but she has a bad chest, and she isn’t allowed out when the weather’s like this. Just as well, for if she did come, it would be half an hour of cough, cough, cough. She’s a musical child, though,’ she added, wanting to be fair. ‘But I’ve another pupil at half past. Pour the tea, Polly. Do you want a biscuit?’
Polly took a biscuit and chewed it absent-mindedly, for a moment at a loss as to how to broach the subject of the birth certificate.
Then she plunged in, what was the point in beating about the bush? ‘I went to Somerset House today, to get a copy of my birth certificate.’
Dora Smith put her cup down so hard that it rattled the saucer.
‘You aren’t still set on going abroad for your honeymoon, are you?’ she said. ‘I don’t advise it, you’ll catch some dreadful disease, it’s not very clean over there.’
‘How do you know? You said you’d never been abroad,’ Polly said, rather crossly.
There was a pause. ‘My … It’s what people say happens to everyone who goes. And you don’t speak any foreign languages, at least if you do, your French teacher never found out about it, your French reports were always shockers.’
‘Roger speaks German and French. Besides, even if we weren’t going abroad, I have to have the birth certificate to get married. That’s what he says.’
‘I really do not see why you’re in such a rush to get married. Roger still has to finish qualifying, and — ’
‘He is qualified.’
‘Then why is he taking more exams?’
‘You have to, if you want to be a hospital doctor.’
Polly felt she hadn’t got to the bottom of her mother’s ambivalent attitude to Roger and her engagement. Dora Smith was a woman with two distinct personalities. The one Polly knew best was the sensible, practical woman, who shared her neighbours’ attitudes and opinions, among which was the certainty that the main purpose of a young woman’s being was to find herself a good, reliable husband, in a respectable way of life, and settle down with him to be a good wife and mother. Within this conventional scenario, Roger was a gem. A doctor was better than the daughter of Ted and Dora Smith might have hoped for, and a catch to brag about to her friends, if Dora were given to bragging, which she wasn’t.
But Dora Smith had another side, the side that had been dismayed at Polly’s precocious artistic talent, that had refused to praise her exceptional promise, yet who had fiercely asserted the need for Polly to do her art as well as she could. ‘If you’re an artist, then you have to be trained properly, to become as good as you can be. It’s not the same as having art as a hobby. One’s professional and the other’s amateur.’ And it was that Dora Smith who had said, clearly and unexpectedly, ‘If you marry Roger, the light will go out of your painting.’
To which Polly might have replied that the light had already gone out of her painting, and so what difference would it make, but that wasn’t an acknowledgement she was going to make to anyone.
‘Can we get back to the birth certificate? Are you sure you can’t find the original? I don’t see how it can be lost, one doesn’t lose something important like a birth certificate.’
Dora Smith didn’t answer, but took a sip of tea, her gaze wandering away from Polly as she looked out of the window. The clock ticked, the stove gave its familiar creaking sound as it cooled, the cat flap on the back door rattled and a large tabby cat slid through it. He gave Polly an uninterested look with his round, golden eyes, swished a stripy tail and went to investigate his food plate.
Still Dora said nothing.
‘I’m not there, in Somerset House,’ Polly persisted. ‘There’s no Pauline Smith registered, not on that date, not anywhere in Highgate. Was I born somewhere else? In a nursing home?’
Her mother sighed, and Polly saw that her eyes, when she looked back from the window, had a glisten of tears in them.
‘Ma, I’m sorry. What is it? What’s the matter?’
The words came out in a rush. ‘You weren’t born in Highgate, you were born in Paris. I haven’t lost your birth certificate. I burnt it.’
‘Burnt it?’ Polly couldn’t believe her ears. ‘Burnt it? Why? When? Just to stop me going abroad? And how could I possibly have been born in Paris? You’ve never been to France, you said so yourself.’
‘I burnt it when you were a baby,’ said Dora Smith, with a sigh. ‘Oh, dear, why did this wretched man want to take you abroad. Or marry you at all? Bringing it all up. I had hoped …’
‘You had hoped what?’ Polly felt a cold sensation in her stomach. Paris?
‘You’ll need all the details if you really must have a passport. I’ll write them down for you.’
Polly watched her mother as she got up and went to the drawer where she kept scraps of paper. She smoothed out the back of an envelope, and wrote in her clear italic hand. Then she passed it to Polly, and went over to stand at the sink.
Polly stared down at the elegantly inscribed words.
‘This makes no sense,’ she exclaimed. ‘Who’s this — I can’t even pronounce it — this Polyhymnia Tomkins?’
‘That’s your real name,’ Dora said, leaning on the sink and running the tap, so that Polly had to raise her voice to be heard.
‘Tomkins? I’m Polly Smith. How can I ever have been called Tomkins? And Polyhymnia? That’s not even a proper name.’
‘I’m not your mother,’ Dora said. ‘And Ted Smith wasn’t your father.’
TWO
On the tram back into the centre of London, Polly sat unseeing, not noticing the people around her, or hearing the grumbles of two women in the next seat about the weather, not aware of the bell clanging, the swaying as the tram went over points, oblivious to everything outside herself, as she tried to make sense of what her mother — who was not her mother, after all — of what Dora Smith had told her.
What kind of a mother could she have been, this woman who had abandoned her so casually into the care of her sister when she was only weeks old, and never saw her again, who clearly didn’t care whether she were alive or dead?
What kind of a mother would call her daughter Polyhymnia?
‘Polyhymnia’s one of the muses,’ Dora Smith told her. ‘The muse of sacred song.’
Sacred song indeed. Well, no one could have been more wrongly named, because, to Dora Smith’s dismay, Polly had no ear for music at all. She had ground her way through piano lessons until both of them had given up with relief, and she couldn’t hold a tune; singing at school had been a case of miming and mumbling, under the constant frowns of the singing mistress.
Dora Smith had been less than forthcoming about her sister, Thomasina. That was another ridiculous name. ‘We went our separate ways,’ was all she would say. ‘We weren’t at all alike.’
‘Where is she? Is she still alive?’
‘I don’t know, and that’s the honest truth.’
‘How could you lose touch with a sister? If I had a sister …’
Which was an unkind thing to say. Of course, if she, Polly, wasn’t the Smiths’ daughter, then Dora Smith had never had children of her own. Polly had asked, when she was a little girl, why she didn’t have a brother or sister, and Ted had put down his newspaper and frowned at her, saying that wasn’t a