She’d pestered her parents about fostering for a while when she was too young to understand what that would entail. It hadn’t been on the cards though, her mum telling her that they wouldn’t be able to cope with not being able to keep the child. Her parents had told her often enough the adoption process had been hard enough emotionally and that they’d all but jumped through hoops to get her. The waiting list had been so long they’d thought it would never happen, but by some small miracle one day they picked up the telephone to find out it had.
Her mum reckoned from the very first moment she’d held her in her arms she’d been theirs. She told a story of how when they left the Barnardos Agency in London, she was holding Isabel tightly in her arms when the woman who’d been looking after their case file came running out after them. Babs had thought she was going to tell them it had all been a misunderstanding and that baby, Isabel wasn’t theirs after all, so she’d started running off down the street. Now that she had her baby, she wasn’t giving her back! It turned out the woman only wanted to give her handbag back, which she’d left sitting on the office floor in her haste to leave. She’d laugh and finish her tale by saying, she and dad had been blessed.
Isabel had reminded them they were blessed more than once when they weren’t feeling particularly so, thanks to some teenage misdemeanour of hers. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known she was adopted either. The book Yours’ by Choice had always sat on the bookshelf. It was there if she wanted to look at it, but she’d never felt the need. Her mum and dad were her mum and dad, and that was that, no big deal. It was other people who saw it as being different, but for the Starks, it was just their little family.
It was strange though because a small part of her was always aware of how old her birth mother would be now—forty-two. And she had when she was younger wondered whether she had any siblings, but it wasn’t something she’d dwell on for long. She’d tried to write a speech about being adopted once for a school project when she was ten after a snotty little madam had teased her about her mum and dad not being her real mum and dad. Her dad had offered to sit and help her with it. This was an unusual and generous offer given the football world cup had been on at the time, but for some reason just talking about it with him made her well up. In the end, she’d decided to do it on something else; she couldn’t remember what now.
There was the time too when she’d had her first ever sleepover and had woken in a panic having dreamed her birth mother had arrived at her friend’s house to take her back. A faceless person in her dream as her adoption was a closed one, and all she knew about the woman who’d given birth to her was she wasn’t a woman at all; she was a girl, and her name was Veronica. She was just fifteen when she’d had her and had decided adoption was the best thing all around; she’d been the one to call her Isabel. Isabel was grateful her parents hadn’t changed her name. If Bab’s had been so inclined to do so, it would have been more than likely she’d have been christened, Diana or if she’d had particularly lofty aspirations for her new daughter, Elizabeth.
She didn’t know where those feelings of fear at losing everything familiar to her had come from the night she’d stayed away from home for the first time. Wherever they’d welled up from, they’d stayed with her for a long time afterward. She’d been told she was an overly sensitive girl more than once during her twenty-six years, but to Isabel’s mind it was a fine line between sensitivity and anxiety. She gave her thumbnail a look of disgust and felt her neck burning once more.
Babs broke her train of thought. ‘Hang on a tick, will you Isabel? I’ll put Prince Charles outside, or I won’t be able to hear a thing you’re saying.’
‘Right-oh.’ Isabel leaned back against the rails, her back to the Pier as she chewed on a strand of muted green hair.
‘Oh dear, that was worse than your dad’s attitude when I make fish pie for tea.’
Isabel laughed having borne witness to this, although she couldn’t quite understand his aversion to the humble fish pie, she was quite partial to it, and her tummy rumbled at the thought of a serving. Despite her husband’s dislike of the dish, Babs insisted on making it arguing that it was brain food and if it was good enough for the queen then it was good enough for the Stark family. She’d once read that the people of Gloucester make a fish pie for the queen each jubilee and coronation. Dad would mutter in reply to this that he’d gladly drop his serving up at Buckingham Palace.
Her mum diverted her thoughts. ‘So, now tell me how is your search going?’
‘Mum, coming to Wight is working out a bit differently to how I thought it would.’ She filled her in on all that had transpired since she’d arrived in Ryde yesterday.
Once Bab’s had gotten over her disbelief and excitement at the possibility of Isabel having
located Constance, she moved on to her daughter’s new landlord. ‘Rhodri? He sounds like a Cornish historical romance hero.’
‘You watch way too much Poldark, Mum, and he’s Welsh by the way, not Cornish.’
‘Is he a nice young man though? He doesn’t
