Elizabeth Edmondson - The Art of Love

‘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.’

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 suitable question to ask. Later, when she was in her bath, being soaped and flannelled from nose to toe by her mother, Dora Smith had said with a sigh that she wished Polly did have a little brother or sister, but fate had chosen for her to be an only child.

I couldn’t have had better parents, Polly told herself fiercely.

Dora Smith had said, with a world of sadness in her voice: ‘You are my daughter, Polly. You’re the only daughter, the only child I had. Ted loved you as if you were his own, and well, a niece is close. A sister’s child. You’re my blood, that counts for a lot.’

Only it didn’t seem to count sister to sister, not if Thomasina had walked out on her sister and her baby’s life with never a backward glance.

‘Why Paris?’ Polly wanted to know. ‘What was she doing in Paris?’

There it was again, Dora’s obvious reluctance to answer questions. ‘She was a bit of a gadabout, restless, never happy in one place. She had friends in Paris, I suppose.’

Illegitimate. Polly stared out into the chilly darkness, vaguely lit by the headlights of cars and streetlights gleaming dully through the thickening fog. She was illegitimate.

‘What you’re saying is that I’m a bastard,’ she had said, raging at Dora.

‘Don’t use that word. Not ever.’

‘It’s the word other people will use. Didn’t that ever occur to my mother?’

‘Your mother…your mother was an unconventional person. She wouldn’t — that is, what people in general might consider a stigma, wouldn’t be to her. I remonstrated with her when she arrived on our doorstep with you in her arms. I said she should marry your father, so that you wouldn’t have the disgrace of illegitimacy, but she said no healthy baby could be any kind of a disgrace.’

‘That was big of her.’

‘They’ll give you a short birth certificate at Somerset House,’ Dora said. ‘One that doesn’t have any blank spaces. Thomasina refused to fill in any details for your father.’