Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster

brought up that matters and you know all about that, you remember the village, of course you do, and now you’re in St Andrews and you won’t ever forget this. You’re a wee Scottish girl through and through.’
    ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Shona said.
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    ‘What did you mean, then? Sometimes, Shona, I think you talk nonsense, you don’t think before you speak - ‘
    ‘I do so.’
    ‘ - and it can be very upsetting.’
    ‘What’s upsetting? “I don’t know what you mean, you talk nonsense, you don’t - ‘
    ‘Shona!’
    Shona was stopped, for the moment. Her ninth birthday came and went and was tolerably satisfactory, but she preferred the treats her father gave her. He took her all the way to London once, on the sleeper, and showed her Buckingham Palace and the Changing of the Guard and they stayed in a proper hotel and went to Madame Tussaud’s, and Shona at last felt in tune with herself, the self that had always wanted to dash about, to be among noise and bustle. She wished, aloud, and passionately, too passionately for a young girl, that she lived in London. Watching her, listening to her, sitting on the train all the long journey home, Archie was touched. It struck him that this was the difference between his own attitude to Shona and his wife’s: Catriona was never merely touched by their daughter’s restlessness and fierceness. Every flash of defiance, every symptom of some deep-seated rebellious spirit, and Catriona was full of despair and apprehension. She didn’t see a clever lively young girl questioning and querying everything and everyone around her, but instead a potential disaster happening when Shona got ‘out of hand’ as she put it. She thought of the good years being over already, those years when Shona could be treated like a doll, when she could be made to a great extent in her mother’s own image, when the force of her own personality had not yet become a real factor in the treatment of her. It wasn’t, Archie knew, that Catriona wished to dominate or subdue Shona but that she wanted her daughter to be in step with her. She wanted harmony and intimacy in their relationship and the prospect instead of a growing discord frightened her.
    It was supposed to be Archie’s job, on these trips he took with Shona, between the ages of nine and twelve, to run the restlessness out of her so that when she came back to her mother she would be a different creature - docile, pleasant, agreeable. But it did not work out like that. Archie saw very well how, on the contrary, being away from her mother and her stable, staid life in St Andrews only made Shona want more of the same. She never wanted to go home, not
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    even after the less successful excursions. It sometimes seemed the girl would rather be anywhere but at home with her mother, and yet Catriona was such a good mother, kind and gentle and absolutely devoted. Remembering his own mother, who had been remote and austere and never once, in so far as he could remember, capable of demonstrating affection, Archie was dismayed at how easily Shona spurned all that was so readily offered to her. But he didn’t think anything could be done about this state of affairs. It was natural. Perhaps when Shona was older she would appreciate her mother more, perhaps when she had children herself… but it was best not to think along those lines. He had always told Catriona to live more in the present, and not to torture herself with anguished speculation about the future, but she was unable to follow his advice.
    By the time Shona was nearing thirteen and already an adolescent, developing far more rapidly than her friends of the same age, Catriona was overwhelmed by her, helpless in the face of her wilfulness. Motherhood still fascinated and absorbed her but she was increasingly frightened of what it involved. She couldn’t talk to Shona about the things that needed to be talked about and felt constantly that she was failing in her own idea of her