by Jojo Moyes
‘Athene, I can’t believe you—’
She stood up, thrust the baby over the table so that he had little choice but to take the bundle. Her voice was urgent, insistent. ‘Please, please, Douglas, dear. I can’t explain. Really.’ Her pleading eyes were an echo of a time before. ‘She’ll be much better off with you.’
‘You can’t just leave me with a baby—’
‘You’ll love her.’
‘Athene, I can’t just—’
Her cool hand was on his arm. ‘Douglas, darling, have I ever asked you for anything? Really?’
He could hardly speak. He was dimly aware of the occupants of the next booth staring at them. ‘But what about you?’ He was babbling, unsure even of what he was saying. ‘What about you and I? I can’t just go home with a baby.’
But she had already turned from him, was packing her bag, fiddling with something inside it, a compact perhaps. ‘I’ve really got to go. I’ll be in touch, Douglas. Thank you so much.’
‘Athene, you can’t just leave me with—’
‘I know you’ll be wonderful with her. A wonderful daddy. Much better than me at that sort of thing.’
He was staring into the folds of the blankets at the innocent face in front of him. She had managed to find her thumb, and was sucking furiously, an expression of rapt concentration on her face. She had Athene’s jet-black eyelashes, her Cupid’s-bow lips. ‘Don’t you even want to say goodbye?’ he asked.
But she was half-way out of the restaurant, her high-heeled shoes clacking like pins over the tiled floor, her shoulders straight in the abominable suit.
‘Her pram’s with the hatcheck girl,’ she called. And without a backward glance she was gone.
He never saw her again.
He had told this story to Vivi some months after it had happened. Until then, she said, Douglas’s family had simply told everyone that Athene was ‘staying abroad’ for a little while, but that she thought the English climate better for the baby. They said ‘the baby’ offhandedly, as if everyone should have known there was one. Some believed they must have been told and somehow forgotten. If anyone had not accepted this version of events, they had said nothing. The poor man had been humiliated enough.
He had told Vivi steadily, not looking at her, a short while after they had heard about Athene’s death. And she had held him while he cried tears of anger, humiliation and loss. Afterwards she realised he’d never asked if the baby was his.
Suzanna, sitting frozen on the tea-chest, was paler, if possible, than she had been when she arrived. She sat there for some time, and Vivi said nothing, allowing her time to digest the story. ‘So she didn’t die giving birth to me?’ she said eventually.
Vivi reached out a hand. ‘No, darling, she—’
‘She ran away from me? She just handed me over? In a bloody fish restaurant?’
Vivi swallowed, wanting Douglas to be there. ‘I just think maybe she knew she wasn’t going to be the mother you needed. I knew her a little in her youth, and she was a pretty wild character. She’d had a hard time with her parents. And it’s possible the man she ran off with might have pushed her . . . Some men are rather resentful of children, especially if – if they aren’t theirs. Douglas always thought he might have been rather cruel to her. So, you see, you shouldn’t judge her too harshly.’ She wished the words sounded more convincing than they had. ‘Things were different then.’
As soon as Athene had left Vivi had returned to Dere. Not in the hope of snaring him: she had always known that he wanted Athene back, that he would never countenance anyone else while the possibility remained. But she had adored him since they were children, and felt that at least she could be something of a support.
‘I had to listen to a lot of stories of how much he loved your mother,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘but he needed help. He couldn’t look after a baby. Not with everything he had to do. And, to begin with, his parents weren’t terribly . . .’ she was trying to find an appropriate word ‘. . . helpful.’ Two months after Athene’s death, he had asked Vivi to marry him.
She pushed her hair off her face.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t tell you the truth earlier. For a long time we all believed we were protecting your father. He had suffered so much humiliation, and so much pain. And then – I don’t know – perhaps we thought we were protecting you. There wasn’t the same emphasis then on everyone knowing everything as there is now.’ She shrugged. ‘We just did what we thought was best.’
Suzanna was crying, had been for several minutes.
Tentatively Vivi lifted a hand towards her. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘But you must have hated me,’ Suzanna said, sobbing.
‘What?’
‘All that time I was in the way, always a reminder of her.’
Vivi, filled finally with a kind of courage, put her arms round her and held her tight. ‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ she said. ‘I loved you. Almost more than my own children.’
Suzanna’s eyes were bleary with tears. ‘I don’t understand.’
Vivi held her daughter’s too-thin shoulders, and tried to impart something of what she felt. Her voice, when it came, was determined, uncharacteristically certain: ‘I loved you because you were the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen,’ she said, and hugged her fiercely. ‘I loved you because none of this was ever your fault. I loved you because from the moment I set eyes on you I couldn’t not love you.’ She paused, her own eyes now filled with tears. ‘And in some small way, Suzanna, I loved you because without you, dearest, dearest child, I would never have had him.’
Later, when she had extricated herself from Suzanna’s arms, Vivi told her how her mother had really died, and Suzanna cried again, for Emma, for Alejandro and, most of all, for Athene, for whose death she hadn’t been responsible after all.
Twenty-Four
The first night that Suzanna Fairley-Hulme spent with her family was the scene of huge upheaval on the Dere estate, of high emotion and sleeplessness, of anxiety, restlessness and barely hidden fear. Transported from the surroundings in which she had spent her first months, from everything and everyone she had known, one might have expected her to have been rather unsettled, but she slept peacefully from dusk until almost seven thirty the following morning. It was the new adults in her life who achieved only a few moments’ sleep.
Rosemary Fairley-Hulme, who had become accustomed to her son’s restored presence in the family house, had panicked when he didn’t arrive home by late evening, and even more so when she realised that neither she nor her husband had any idea where he had spent the day. Until midnight she had paced the creaking floorboards, glancing out of the leaded windows in the vain hope of seeing twin headlights coming slowly up the drive. The housekeeper, roused from her bed, told Rosemary that she had seen Mr Douglas take a taxi to the station at ten o’clock that morning. The Stationmaster, when she got Cyril to ring him, said he had been wearing his good suit. ‘Up for a show, was he?’ he asked jovially. ‘Good for him to let his hair down a little.’
‘Something like that, Tom,’ said Cyril Fairley-Hulme, and put down the receiver.
That was the point at which they had rung Vivi, hoping against hope that although when she came to Dere House several times a week, he appeared to pay her no more heed than the furniture perhaps just this once, their son had taken her into town.
‘Gone?’ said Vivi, and felt a lurch of fear when she understood that Douglas, her Douglas, who had spent the past months weeping privately on her shoulder, confiding his darkest feelings about the departure of his wife, had been keeping something from her.
‘We were rather hoping he was with you. He hasn’t been home all night. Cyril’s out in the car looking for him now,’ Rosemary had said.
‘I’ll be right over,’ said Vivi and, despite her discomfort, felt vaguely satisfied that, despite the late hour, Rosemary had seemed to think this appropriate.
Vivi had rushed over to the estate, unsure whether she was m
ore afraid that he was lying injured in a ditch or that his disappearance was linked to the reappearance of someone else. He still loved Athene, she knew it. She had had to hear him say it often enough over the past months. But that had been bearable when she could believe that his feelings had been dying, like the embers of a fire – one that, now she had heard all the details, she had not thought would be restoked.
Between the hours of midnight and dawn, split into small groups, armed with flashlights, they had combed the estate, in case he had walked home drunk and fallen into a ditch. A lad had done this several years previously and drowned; the memory of finding that body face down in several inches of stagnant water haunted Cyril still.
‘He’s not drunk much since the first weeks,’ he said, as they strode along, bumping gently against each other in the moonlight. ‘The boy’s past the worst. Much more himself.’
‘He’ll be at a friend’s, Mr Fairley-Hulme. I’ll wager he’s had a few and stayed in London for the night.’ The gamekeeper, who walked the Rowney Wood with the agility and confidence of someone well used to negotiating branches and tree roots in the dark, took a sanguine view of the affair. He had remarked four times now that boys would be boys.
‘Might have headed over to Larkside,’ muttered one of the lads. ‘Most end up at Larkside one time or another.’
Vivi winced: the house on the village outskirts was spoken of in whispered tones or drunken jest and the thought of Douglas lowering himself to that level, that he might turn to women like that when she was just waiting for him to say the word . . .
‘He’s got more sense than to end up there.’
‘Not if he’s had a skinful. He’s been on his own a good year.’
She heard the soft thud of the gamekeeper’s boot meeting cloth, and a muttered curse.
‘This is hopeless,’ said Cyril. ‘Bloody, bloody Douglas. Bloody inconsiderate boy.’
Vivi glanced up at his set jaw as she trudged along, her cardigan wrapped round her in a vain attempt to stave off the cold. She knew his condemnation of Douglas was designed to disguise his anxiety. He, like Vivi, knew the depths of Douglas’s despair.
‘He’ll turn up,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s so sensible. Really.’
No one thought to go to Philmore House. Why would they, when he had hardly set foot there since she had left? So it was only an hour after dawn broke, when the two search parties converged in the cold light, chilled and increasingly silent, outside the Philmore barns, that anyone thought of it.
‘There’s a light, Mr Fairley-Hulme,’ said one of the lads, gesturing. ‘In the upstairs window. Look.’
And as they stood on the overgrown, dew-soaked lawn, their eyes raised to the upper floors of the old house, the sound of birdsong building to a swell around them, the front door had opened. And there he had stood, his shadowed eyes betraying his own night of lost sleep, his good suit trousers wrinkled and his shirt-sleeves rolled up, a child sleeping peacefully in his arms.
‘Douglas!’ Rosemary’s exclamation had held a mixture of shock and relief.
There had been a brief silence then, as the little group of people properly took in the sight in front of them.
Douglas looked down, and adjusted the shawl around the baby.
‘What’s going on, son?’
‘This . . . is Suzanna,’ he said quietly. ‘Athene has given her to me. That is all I want to say on the matter.’ He looked both bruised and defiant.
Vivi’s mouth had dropped open, and she closed it. She heard the gamekeeper curse vigorously under his breath.
‘But we thought – oh, Douglas, what on earth has been—’
Cyril, his eyes fixed on his son, stayed his wife with a hand on her shoulder. ‘Not now, Rosemary.’
‘But, Cyril! Look at the—’
‘Not now, Rosemary.’ He nodded at his son, and turned back towards the drive. ‘Let’s all get some rest. The boy’s safe.’
Vivi felt him propel her gently across the lawns: she, too, was expected to leave.
‘Thank you, everyone,’ she heard him say, as she glanced back towards Douglas, who was still gazing at the gently illuminated face of the child. ‘If you’d like to head back to Dere House I think we could all do with some coffee. Plenty of time for talking when we’ve had some sleep.’
He had gone to Philmore House, Douglas told Vivi long afterwards, because he had needed to be alone, was unsure whether he could admit even to himself the truth of what had happened that day. Perhaps he went because, carrying Athene’s child, he felt some primeval urge to be closer to her mother, to take the child to where some familiarity, some sense of her, might rub off. Either way, he stayed at the house only two days before he found that coping alone with a baby was beyond him.
Rosemary had, at first, been incandescent with fury. She would not have that woman’s child in the house, she exclaimed, when Douglas arrived at the family home. She could not believe he’d been so stupid, so gullible. She could not believe he would expose himself to such ridicule. What next? Would they be expected to put up Athene’s lovers too?
That had been the point at which Cyril had told her to go off for a bit, get some air. In a quieter, more measured voice, he had tried to reason with his son. He had to see sense, didn’t he? He was a young man, he couldn’t be saddled with bringing up a baby. Not with his whole life ahead of him. Especially one who . . . The words were left unspoken. Something in Douglas’s implacable stare had halted him mid-sentence.
‘She’s staying here,’ Douglas had said. ‘That’s all there is to it.’ He already held her with the relaxed dexterity of the young father.
‘And how will you support her?’ Cyril said. ‘You can’t expect us to carry you. Not with all the work that needs doing on the estate. And your mother won’t do it. You know she won’t.’
‘I’ll sort something out,’ said Douglas.
Later he confided to Vivi that his quiet determination had not just been about his desire to keep the child, although he had loved her already. He didn’t like to admit to his father that even if he had wanted to give Suzanna back, had chosen to accede to his family’s wishes, he hadn’t thought to ask Athene how he should get in touch with her.
The first few days had been farcical. Rosemary had ignored the child’s presence, and busied herself in her garden. The estate wives had been less condemnatory, or at least to his face, bringing, as they heard the news, their old high chairs, bibs and muslins, a whole arsenal of baby necessities that he had not considered might be necessary for the care of one small human being. He had begged Bessie to advise him on the basics, and she had spent a morning explaining the correct pinning of a napkin, how best to heat bottles of milk, how to make solid food digestible by mashing it with a fork. She had watched from afar, disapproval mingling with anxiety for the child as he tried hamfistedly to feed her, swearing and wiping food off his clothes as the little one batted the loaded spoon away from her face.
Within days he was exhausted. His father’s patience had been stretched by Douglas’s inability to work, the papers piled up in the study and the men were complaining about lack of direction on the land.
‘What are you going to do?’ said Vivi, having watched as he jiggled the baby under his arm while trying to negotiate with a feed merchant on the telephone. ‘Why don’t you get a wet-nurse, or whatever it is that babies have?’
‘She’s too old for a wet-nurse,’ he replied, lack of sleep making him snappy. He didn’t say what they both thought: that the child needed her mother.
‘Are you all right? You look awfully tired.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
‘But you can’t possibly manage everything by yourself.’
‘Don’t you start, Vee. Not you with everyone else.’
She bridled, hurt at his assumption that she belonged with ‘everyone else’. She watched silently as he walked up and down the room, dangling his keys in front of the baby’s grasping hands, muttering some checklist under his
breath.
‘I’ll help you,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’ve got no work at the moment. I’ll look after her for you.’ She didn’t know what had made her say it.
His eyes widened, hope flickering across his face. ‘You?’
‘I’ve done toddlers. Babysat them, I mean. When I was in London. One of her age can’t be that much harder.’
‘You’d really look after her?’
‘For you, yes.’ She blushed at her choice of words, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Oh, Vee. You’d really look after her? Every day? Until I can get something else sorted out, of course. Till I can work out what to do.’ He had walked towards her, as if he was already keen to hand Suzanna over.
She hesitated then, suddenly seeing in that dark, satiny hair, the wide blue eyes, the memory of a painful time before. Then she looked back at him, at the relief and gratitude on his face.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I would.’
Her parents had been appalled. ‘You can’t do this,’ her mother had said. ‘It’s not even your child.’
‘We mustn’t visit the sins of the fathers, Mummy,’ she had replied, sounding more confident than she felt. ‘She’s a perfectly adorable baby.’ She had just rung Mr Holstein to tell him she wouldn’t be returning to London.
Mrs Newton, agitated, had gone so far as to call on Rosemary Fairley-Hulme, and had been surprised to find her just as fierce in her opposition to the whole sorry scheme. The young people appeared to have made up their minds, said Rosemary, despairingly. There was certainly no telling Douglas.
‘But, darling, think about it. I mean, she could come back at any time. And you have your job, your career. This could go on for years.’ Her mother had been close to tears. ‘Think, Vivi. Think of how he hurt you before.’
I don’t care. Douglas needs me, she said silently, enjoying the sensation of being united with him against the world. That’s good enough for me.
