Lost Daughter

by Ali Mercer

  This hurts – it hurts like a lance dipping into Rachel’s side – but there is nothing to be done about it, apart from ignoring the pain for now.

  But why should Becca have to suffer, too?

  She turns back to Mitch.

  ‘Are you going to be able to support this baby?’

  ‘I will be able to support it,’ Leona says. ‘If money is what you’re worried about, you shouldn’t be. It won’t have any impact on your financial arrangements with Mitch. That’s to do with your child. It’s nothing to do with mine.’

  How can she be so cold, so objective – as if they’d never been friends, as if she hadn’t cried in front of Rachel and let Rachel comfort her, as if Rachel hadn’t tried to help her? But she’s thinking of the baby now. Rachel is out of the picture.

  If that’s the way things are to be… then Rachel will have to put her child first, too.

  ‘What about Becca?’ Rachel says, looking from Mitch to Leona and back again. ‘She told me you’d been here, Leona. She said you’d been out for a walk to the weir.’

  It is galling in the extreme to think of Leona meeting Becca, right here in Rose Cottage, sizing Becca up, assessing how she would adapt to the arrival of the new addition… And Becca being oblivious. Because Becca wouldn’t have guessed, would she? She might perhaps have suspected a flirtation. But not a baby…

  ‘About Becca. We were hoping you might help us with that,’ Mitch says.

  ‘Help you?’

  But she already knows what they’re going to ask for.

  They need to have Becca on board. They want to welcome their child into a world in which its teenage half-sibling, shut away in an upstairs bedroom, doesn’t resent and despise it. And even if Becca doesn’t play ball, they will welcome the child anyway, and into this house.

  Becca will no longer be an only child. Her existence has been reshuffled like a pack of cards, and so has Rachel’s.

  ‘You see, I’m hoping to spend quite a bit of time here over the summer,’ Leona says. ‘We don’t want Becca to suspect something, and then feel that secrets are being kept from her – she’s such an observant girl, she might have clocked that something is going on already.’ (How dare she? How dare she express any opinion of any kind about Rachel’s daughter?) ‘That’s why we thought it would be best to sit her down and tell her what’s going on sooner rather than later, and certainly as close to the beginning of the summer holidays as possible. In the normal way of things, we might not have needed to think about it quite so early. After all, I’m not twelve weeks gone yet.’ She gives Mitch a coy little smile. ‘The idea is to let you and Becca know, but not to go public more generally just yet. I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t mind keeping it to yourself, at least for the time being. It’ll give us a chance to get used to the idea before we have to deal with what anyone else thinks about it.’

  ‘I’m not in a rush to broadcast the happy news, funnily enough,’ Rachel says.

  Her chest has gone tight again. Breathe in strawberry, out like blowing a candle. She surveys the pair of them – her husband, and the friend and former colleague she obviously didn’t know quite as well as she thought.

  This is it. This is all the power she has: to make life easy for them, or, conversely, to set out to be as awkward and uncooperative as possible.

  Of all the women in a woman’s life, is there anyone who is more terrifying than the woman who loves your husband after you?

  Maybe only the mother-to-be of his next child…

  Leona’s baby. Mitch’s baby. The screaming, messy, sex-life-wrecking reality that is heading their way.

  But also… the sweet milky smell of newborn skin, the knitted bonnets, the tiny babygros… And the pride, too, the watching from a small but slowly increasing distance as the child sits up, takes steps, stays on the other side of the school gates on the first day of term…

  It’s like looking through a telescope, but it’s not Leona and Mitch’s future that it brings into view, it’s Mitch and Rachel’s past.

  ‘We thought it might be best if we all told Becca together,’ Leona says.

  Leona is fiddling with something – a charm on a necklace, hanging by her chest. Oh God, it’s the rose quartz – the present Rachel had given her at the airport when she flew out to see Bluebell. She sees that Rachel has noticed it and her hand drops, and for the first time she looks ashamed.

  Rachel says, ‘You mean like those chats good parents have in the movies? The one where they tell the little girl that Mummy and Daddy still love her very much, they just don’t love each other any more?’

  ‘Rachel,’ Mitch says warningly.

  ‘You could always just hide Leona upstairs and get her to come down and rescue you if the shouting gets too loud?’ Rachel suggests.

  ‘No need to be like that,’ Mitch says stiffly. ‘We’re all in this together. We’re the adults in this situation, supposedly. Becca is only a child, and she’s vulnerable. It’s not so long since she was having problems at school. We have to focus on what she needs, and try to put how we feel about it aside. After all, she’s had a lot to deal with over the last year.’

  Strawberry, candle. Strawberry, candle.

  ‘Were you always such a hypocrite?’ Rachel asks. ‘Maybe I just never noticed it before. Strikes me that you weren’t exactly thinking about Becca when you got Leona pregnant.’

  She gets to her feet and looks down at them both, sitting at the kitchen table – the one she and Mitch had chosen together, the scene of so many Christmas dinners and birthday cakes.

  How much does she know about Leona, really? She had assumed that they were allies, whatever happened; that what they had in common would always be more powerful than all the ways in which they were different, and all the things they had never talked about. And yet Mitch had hinted that she didn’t know everything about Leona. And Leona had never told her exactly why she gave Bluebell up.

  Rachel turns to Mitch again. ‘You said that Leona told you something that I didn’t know. What exactly were you getting at?’

  ‘Nothing that need concern you,’ Mitch says stiffly.

  ‘If she’s going to be spending a lot of time in my house, with my daughter, it does concern me.’

  ‘It is not your house,’ Mitch objects.

  ‘Yes, well, we’ll see about that, shall we? Things will be different when Becca’s grown up and finished school. Maybe even before that.’ She stares at Leona, who is suddenly deathly pale. ‘What did you do, Leona? What was it that meant you had to give Bluebell up?’

  ‘That’s enough, Rachel,’ Mitch says, getting to his feet. ‘All that is in the past, and it’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I know you really don’t want to tell me,’ Rachel says. ‘And you know what? That makes me really want to know.’

  ‘Do you have to be so hostile?’ Mitch says. ‘Look, we need to think about Becca. Agree a date to sit down with her. Get things sorted.’

  ‘You did this; you tell her. I’m damned if I’m going to,’ Rachel says. ‘And in the meantime, until I know exactly what Leona did, I don’t want you leaving her alone with Becca. Ever. I’m going to find out what happened. I have a right to know. And when I do, who knows, maybe it’ll make me feel differently about who my daughter should be living with.’

  And she turns and walks out.

  She waits for a moment at the front door. She can hear a low murmur of voices from the kitchen. It sounds as if Leona is crying, and Mitch is comforting her.

  For a moment Rachel is tempted to go back in – to apologise, to agree to do whatever they want. In her heart of hearts, she doesn’t believe that Leona would ever have done anything deliberate to hurt Bluebell, or that she poses any kind of threat to Becca now; she had only wanted to hurt her back. Yes, Leona is having a baby, Mitch’s baby… but it isn’t as if she has crept into Rachel’s home and stolen her place. Leona is nothing to do with the end of Rachel’s relationship with Mitch. That was already dead; Leona’s just the p
roof of it.

  The sound of crying stops. Rachel hears Mitch say, quietly but with absolute sincerity, ‘Please don’t worry. I love you, and I love this baby.’

  There is silence – a soft, caressing silence. He must be kissing her.

  Rachel shuts the door – perhaps a little louder than was strictly necessary – and goes out to the car.

  No need to rush. Mitch is hardly about to come out and challenge her. She’s as free to be here as she will ever be.

  She sits there for a while, composing herself, trying to think of nothing, watching the play of light and shadow, the trees. Time seems to unfold and unspool. She sees the house covered in snow, in spring, and bright with summer again. A young child in wellington boots making her way down to the stream. Not Becca. Another girl, or maybe a boy.

  When she closes her eyes, it is Viv she thinks of; not in any specific way, but as a warm, comforting presence, encouraging and benign.

  Help me, she thinks, but there is no answer, or at least, none that can be formulated in words.

  Forty-Three

  Rachel

  Nineteen years before the loss

  The bus was crowded, but her favourite spot, the double seat at the front of the top deck, was still free. She opened her book and started reading, and didn’t look up when someone sat next to her. A man. A man who was just a little bit too close, as if he wanted her to notice him. She squeezed along so that he wasn’t pressing against her and kept her eyes on her book.

  He said, ‘Is that good, then?’

  He was youngish but older than she was, and smelt strongly of aftershave and weakly of beer. He was wearing a suit and had carefully gelled hair. She avoided meeting his eyes: she didn’t want to encourage him.

  ‘Seems all right so far,’ she said.

  ‘Only all right? I wouldn’t bother then, if I was you. Been at work today?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Under her coat she was wearing the green and white striped uniform dress of Pinkney’s department store, a dead giveaway.

  ‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘It’s been a tough one. But, you know, it’s Saturday night, right?’

  She made the smallest possible sound of agreement. Maybe he just wasn’t going to take the hint. The bus moved off and she looked over her shoulder for a free spot she could move to. But there was nothing apart from the empty seat just behind her, next to a boy with untidy, overlong hair who had headphones on and was staring gloomily out of the fogged-up windows at the Christmas lights.

  If only she was sitting there, everything would be fine. He looked like someone who would run a mile rather than pester a stranger into conversation. Unlike the man sitting next to her, who seemed to expect her to be flattered by the attention.

  The man in the suit said, ‘What’s your name, anyway?’

  ‘Look, I’m really not in the mood. I just want to read my book.’

  ‘You don’t have to be in the mood for anything. I just thought it would be nice to have a bit of a chat. I’m not a monster, you know. I’m actually a pretty nice guy, if you’d only give me a chance.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want to give you a chance.’

  ‘You really have got a rod up your backside, haven’t you? You seriously need to relax. That might be something I could help you with, you know.’

  ‘Just listen to her, would you? She doesn’t want to talk to you. Leave her alone,’ someone growled.

  It was the boy sitting behind them, who’d taken off his headphones and was glaring at her neighbour as if he’d like to bore holes in his skull. He looked as if he didn’t much care if he got into a fight, and as if nothing would give him greater pleasure than to be forced to punch the source of his annoyance on the nose.

  Rachel’s neighbour hesitated, but pride wouldn’t let him give up immediately. He said, ‘It’s rude to listen in to other people’s conversations, you know. So how about you mind your own business?’

  ‘That was not a conversation, it was you being a pain in the arse. So why don’t you just get lost and give us all some peace?’

  The two of them glared at each other. Rachel’s neighbour was older, but the boy had the advantage of being slightly taller and broader in the shoulders, and of looking convincingly menacing. Rachel held her breath. This could only go one of two ways; either one of them would back down, or someone was liable to get hurt.

  ‘I was only being friendly,’ her neighbour muttered. He got to his feet, stumbled towards the stairwell and disappeared.

  A ripple of approval ran round the top deck. A woman sitting on the other side of the aisle stood up to ring the bell and then reached across to pat Rachel on the shoulder. ‘You ask me, that one’s a keeper,’ she said, and went off.

  Rachel felt herself blushing. She turned to have a proper look at the boy behind her. He was pale, with a saturnine face and slanting green eyes. He was studying her, too, coolly and assessingly, as if mentally measuring her face for a purpose that he wasn’t about to explain.

  ‘I suppose I should thank you,’ she said. ‘But, you know, I also feel obliged to point out that I can look after myself.’

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ he said. ‘He was annoying me as well. I don’t like bullies, and anyway, I wanted to read, too.’

  Rachel leaned forward and saw the book in his lap, a large volume open at a full-colour reproduction of Klimt’s painting The Kiss.

  ‘I love that painting,’ she said.

  It wasn’t that long since she’d bought a poster of it for her room; she’d been entranced by the romance of it, the man and woman embracing in a shower of gold. Her dad had not been pleased. Don’t stick things on the walls like that. You’ll make holes in the paintwork. Anyway, it looks like sick. She had ended up taking the poster down, and redecorating.

  ‘Everyone loves that painting,’ the boy said, and smiled at her. He had a dimple in one cheek. Suddenly he looked mischievous, and surprisingly sweet. ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘You might think it’s silly. It’s the kind of book you have to hide from people you know. Or I do, anyway.’

  She held it up so he could see the cover, which was bright yellow with a light bulb on the front and the title written in a circle round it: Ten Ways to the Life You Want.

  He said, ‘So what is the life you want?’

  She put the book back down on her lap and closed it. ‘I want to get a place of my own. That’s the main thing, so I’ll need to find a job that’ll pay me enough to do that. Hopefully in a nice office somewhere. I work in the café at Pinkney’s, and I’m like the world’s worst waitress. I’m always getting distracted and dropping things.’

  She was conscious of trying to make an impression on him. Exaggerating. Flirting. Not something she usually did. At school she was one of the quiet ones. Out of school, she stayed home, usually in her bedroom. As far as possible, she kept herself to herself.

  ‘My dad runs a building business, and I did some roofing for him last summer,’ the boy said. ‘I was useless at it. No head for heights. Everyone else laughed at me.’

  ‘So you’re not going to follow in your dad’s footsteps?’

  ‘I’m not sure he’d want me, to be honest. Luckily he’s got my brother to bring on board. Those two have big plans. They want to have some kind of property empire. My mum thinks I should be a lawyer. She seems to have this idea that I could become their consigliere. Only problem with that is, I have no head for figures and zero interest in proving whether other people are right or wrong.’

  ‘There’s not much hope for either of us, then.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure there’s hope,’ he said. ‘There’s always hope, isn’t there? It’s just a question of finding the right way. I should probably read that book of yours.’

  He smiled at her again. That smile was just the best thing. It made her feel like a cat basking in sunshine. She couldn’t believe this was happening, right here on the top deck of the 113 bus. To her. She was suddenly conscious of her heart, beating just a little loude
r and faster than usual.

  And then she remembered that she ought to be getting off the bus. Where were they? Outside, the bingo hall went by. She’d nearly missed her stop, and it wouldn’t do to be late back.

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to go,’ she said, jumping up and lunging for the bell.

  As she hurried away she caught sight of the expression on his face – startled and bereft – and it stayed with her as she made her way from the bus stop to her house.

  She’d left her book behind; it must have slid off her lap onto the floor when she stood up, and she’d been in such a rush that she hadn’t noticed it.

  Well, maybe it would be some use to him.

  Her dad’s van was parked outside the house. As she turned her key in the door she steeled herself for whatever the evening ahead might hold – maybe nothing, it might all be fine, he might even be in a good mood. You never knew.

  She set aside the memory of that small, perfect encounter on the bus as if it was a treasure, something to take out and pore over later, in secret, when the day’s chores were done.

  The following Saturday when Rachel came out of Pinkney’s after work someone was waiting for her.

  When he saw her he beamed at her and it was just as good as she’d remembered. It was him, the boy who didn’t like bullies and liked reading about art, the boy she kept thinking about. He was loitering hopefully with a bunch of roses in one hand and her book in the other.

  ‘I thought you might like this back,’ he said, and handed over the book. ‘Also, I got these for you. I hope they’re all right. I wasn’t sure what to choose.’

  She thanked him and took the roses and admired them. They were dark red, with velvety petals. Nobody had ever bought her flowers before. Would it be safe to take them home? Her dad would probably have something to say about it.

  Still… she had them for now.

  ‘So did you read the book?’ she asked him. ‘Did you find out the ten ways to the life you want?’

  ‘I did read some of it, actually.’