I too went to the convent. My name is in the visitors’ book along with Rebecca’s and Ben’s and Christopher’s. It was Sister Lawrence who suggested I contact NORCAP, which I did, on the day of Martin’s eighteenth: birthday: 12 March 1977. And so, when Christopher contacted me a few months later, I had no reason to believe he wasn’t my son. He wrote to me and I replied with enough information for him to reflect back to me the image I wanted so badly to see. I informed his lies. And if he found evidence of his fabricated origins in me, then I looked for evidence of the boy I had lost in him. When I half-closed my eye, he saw and adopted the idiosyncrasy as his own. When he half-closed his eye, I remember thinking it was a family tic, something only the Curtiss family did – my sister, Miriam, does it; my own mother does it too. But it was nothing of the sort. He saw it and copied it and it became his. His height – who knows? It may have been his father, Richard, an odd man who apparently shared his interest in history. And of course Rebecca’s father, Claud, was tall and short-sighted, like Christopher. The black hair could have been from Mikael, I thought once, before remembering that of course it wasn’t, since Mikael was not his father. It was from his mother. His poor devastated mother.
But in among all his lies, as in most elaborate deceptions, were truths. It was true that he had traced his mother, Rebecca, though not through any official channels. He had indeed found her, not on the day he said but on another day, four years earlier, using the information from the convent. He had found and spoken with his grandfather at the family home in Stockton Heath – a lovely, decent man whom I met at Rebecca’s funeral. Under the most difficult of circumstances, he was dignity itself, as was his lovely long-suffering wife. It was Rebecca’s father who had given Christopher Rebecca’s details. Yes, this was all true, except for the fact that it happened in late 1977, not Easter 1981. By the time Ben arrived at our home, Christopher already knew his real mother’s whereabouts – he may even have kept tabs on her, given her money over the years – who knows? And so, sadly, the rest of that sorry tale is a version of the truth, albeit perhaps a few different occasions woven into one. Christopher had only to go to the address he had already visited years before and persuade her to meet him in the Wilsons, and thereafter accelerate her progress on her inexorable path to destruction.
They found the note from Margaret in Rebecca’s purse, the promise of one mother to another to look after the infant Billy and to call him Christopher, after St Christopher. When I think about that, I am filled with sadness. He was so particular about his name. All that love his adoptive parents had for him, love he was not able to see because it was not presented in the exact way he wanted. What is subject to hypothesis is that Christopher saw in Rebecca a mother he did not want and set about claiming one he did want. That is my hypothesis, which I have added to these pages. He was looking for me, or someone like me. He was looking for his ideal. But most of all, I think he was looking for himself. He was always looking for himself.
Back in Morecambe, there was a family in which he felt he did not belong. So he was adrift, searching for a place in this world. Aren’t we all? And perhaps, knowing that the other adopted baby had gone to the US, he decided to take that baby’s mother for himself. A calculated risk. He tracked her down. Her, Phyllis. Me. He found me, and upon finding me invested all his dreams. He saw a family he wanted, a home he wanted, a woman he wanted. He wanted it all so badly, he buried whatever troublesome truth stood in his way, enabling him to step into my home. And stepping into my home was all he had to do to fill a space I had already made for him. He stepped in and made my life his, in the process forsaking Margaret and Jack, who had done nothing but love him.
So what of Liverpool Council, of the friendly, businesslike Samantha Jackson and her wise, solid advice, her neat grey hair and sharp burgundy suit? Utter fabrication. Christopher never went through any official channel, never went to the Liverpool Council buildings, nor indeed to Liverpool, other than with me on shopping trips to buy clothes or with the family when we went to the Casa Italia restaurant on Matthew Street for one or other of our birthdays. He was too desperate to find what he wanted; he could not possibly have waited for official records. There was no Samantha Jackson at Liverpool Council in 1977 or indeed at any other time. I have no idea whether the offices dealing with adoption are even in Henry Street, but I had no reason to check. The day he told me he made the long, cold walk from Liverpool Lime Street to Henry Street was the day he went to the convent: Friday, 28 October 1977.
But this is the thing: when he told me how he’d found that letter from Samantha Jackson in his pigeonhole at the halls, for example, and that his heart leapt at the sight, I believed him and I still believe him. When he told me he’d known it would be there, I took him at his word as he gave me to understand it – that is, that he meant his sixth sense of things. And here again, I believe he meant it in that way, that his need to believe his own version of events was deep enough for him to deny the truth, which was that he knew in the literal sense that the letter was there because he had put it there. He had put it there because he had written it. But in the moment of seeing it, in the moment of plucking it from the pigeonhole, he had suppressed even this. His joy was real. His sixth sense, to him, was real.
I sometimes wonder if he took the name Samantha from Bewitched, a programme he told me he’d enjoyed when he was younger. He loved to watch television. He had written the letters from Samantha and stored them in the box under his bed, along with my letters and his birth certificate. The police found the postmark on Samantha’s envelopes to be Leeds. He had drawn official headings at the top of the pages, an almost childish coat of arms, before typing the letters himself. As for the court overseeing the adoption, he never contacted them. He did not apply for Martin’s birth certificate. He can’t have done, since birth certificates were a matter of public record, and had he done so, why bother to forge one? Of course I never saw it until the police searched his room and there it was, in amongst the fake letters from Samantha and the real letters from me: a sad attempt, typed up on pink A4 paper, the lines hand-drawn in red felt-tip pen. Who were they for, these letters from Liverpool Council, this pathetic, unconvincing fake birth certificate? Not for me; I would never have asked him for proof. Not for anyone but himself alone, the scaffolding for a fantasy he needed so badly to make real – as a lonely child creates an imaginary world, or a murderer fabricates an alibi.
And Ben, my son, whom I never got to meet or know. This is my fantasy, my need to create an alternative truth for myself. What I wrote about Ben came from the scant contents of two letters from a young man looking for his mother. He didn’t name his parents in his letters, so at first I called them X and Y until I found out from the inquest that they were called Dorothy and George. George was a lawyer and Dorothy a housewife, but she was not an alcoholic. I made her an alcoholic because I was jealous of her. Maybe I wanted her to have failed him as I had. In the story I created for Ben, I made him precociously successful – why not? In reality, he was working as a waiter at night, and was an intern by day. He was on his way though. He just hadn’t got quite so far as I would have had myself believe. Call it my indulgence, the exaggeration of a proud mother. And Martha, his fiancée, really is a primary school teacher. She wrote to me, sent me photos of herself and Ben. She seems lovely, and I choose to believe she is. Maybe one day I’ll go and meet her. In my version of events, she loved him very much and I like to think this is the truth. Of course she loved him. Who wouldn’t love a son of mine?
* * *
I don’t see Betsy as much now, but if she passes my door she always calls in.