The Lies We Told

by Camilla Way

  “Jesus Christ,” Tom whispered.

  “We found out later that she had made suicide attempts before, had been diagnosed with bipolar long before she met your father. I didn’t know what to do,” Rose cried. “I was in shock. I just took the baby, took her from her pram, and put her in the pushchair with Emily and then I ran. I thought people would say I pushed her, or that I made her jump, or that I had driven her to it, that when it all came out about your father and her, it would look like I’d engineered the whole thing. I wasn’t thinking straight—I panicked. I just ran. I didn’t know what else to do!”

  For a long moment after she had finished speaking, Rose and Tom stood silently in the center of the room, while Oliver sat, his head in his hands. Beyond the window, clouds moved in front of the moon, the endless empty fields stretching on beneath it cast suddenly into darkness.

  TWENTY-SIX

  SUFFOLK, 1981

  I didn’t notice the baby, not straightaway. Rose and Oliver both looked so awful, were in such a state, that it took me a few moments before I saw the tiny creature wrapped in a blanket in Rose’s arms. And it’s funny, but I realized immediately then: before they even had to say anything, I had already guessed whose she was. “Oh, Rose . . . ,” I said.

  “Beth, we need your help,” she replied.

  It was at that moment that Doug came into the hall. “What’s going on?” he asked, taking in the sight of the four of them.

  But Rose didn’t shift her eyes from mine. “There’s been an accident, Beth,” she said, her voice low and strained. “There’s been a terrible accident and you have to help us.”

  Once we were all seated in our living room, you could have heard a pin drop as Rose began to tell us what had happened. When she got to the part where Nadia jumped, I gasped, and Doug got to his feet. “And you didn’t call the coastguards, the police?” he asked, incredulously. “What the hell were you thinking? You just ran? You took the baby and ran?” He turned first to Oliver and then to me. “For God’s sake, we need to tell someone!”

  Rose stared at him, her face still drained of color, her eyes wide and bright. In her arms the baby began to stir.

  “Doug,” I said firmly, “sit down,” and he was so surprised that he did what I asked. I went to Rose and gently lifted the child from her arms. God, she was tiny. She was so, so tiny. I suppose my nurse’s instincts kicked in, because I suddenly felt very calm. “Do you have formula and nappies for her?” I asked. When Rose didn’t reply, only gazed at me blankly, I had to go to her and take hold of her shoulder while I said it again, loudly and slowly. I noticed that she was trembling quite violently.

  At last she nodded. “Yes, yes, I—they’re in the bag beneath Emily’s pushchair. We stopped on the way. There was some milk still left in the bottle that she had with her. I think . . . I think maybe it’s breast milk.” She clamped a hand to her mouth. “Oh God,” she cried. “Oh God!”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good.” When I’d got the bag, I turned to Doug, handing him a bottle and a tin of Cow & Gate. “Just follow the instructions on the side.”

  It was then that Oliver spoke for the first time. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I mean, please, if I may?” He looked so meek and uncertain, so very different from the dashing, charming man I’d met that day in the supermarket. In fact, at that moment he looked more like a cowed, frightened . . . well, wimp is the only word I can think of, to be honest. I felt a sharp, cold flash of disdain. I looked away and nodded, and he followed Doug into the kitchen.

  Rose began to cry again. “That poor woman,” she said. “Oh, Beth, that poor, poor woman.”

  And it’s funny, because there I was, a baby in my arms, Rose’s desperate, frightened eyes staring back at me, the knowledge that a woman had died that night, and yet I felt completely calm. Here they were, these big important people, so clever, so successful compared to me, sitting in my living room, miserable and terrified and wanting me to make it all better for them. I held her to me, little Lana, as she was called then, and knew what Rose was going to ask me to do.

  When Oliver came back in with the bottle of milk, he hesitated, then passed it to me. “Would you like to do it?” I asked him. I raised the baby slightly, offering her to him, and I saw his eyes dart to Rose, saw her briefly shake her head, and, deflated, he dropped his gaze and turned away. I will remember forever the disgust I felt for that man right then. I had thought that he and Rose were so admirable, people to look up to. I realized in that moment how very wrong I’d been.

  I turned to Rose. “What are you asking us to do?”

  To her credit, she didn’t bother beating around the bush. “You want a child,” she said bluntly. “You want a baby. I can arrange everything, all the hospital paperwork, so you can get a birth certificate saying she is yours.”

  Only Doug was surprised. He looked from one to the other of us in confusion before the penny dropped. “Are you completely out of your minds?” he said. “This is absolute madness! You need to go to the police and tell them what happened. We want no part of this. We could be arrested. Aiding and abetting, it’s called, or . . . or obstructing the police or something. Absolutely not. This is your mess, not ours.”

  “What if they think I killed her?” Rose cried. “That I pushed her! It will all come out who she is—they’ll say I did it out of revenge. Even if they don’t blame me, there will be such a scandal. My career . . .” She turned to me imploringly. “You are our only hope, Beth. Haven’t you always wanted a child? Now you can be a mother at last. Please, Beth. Please!”

  Silently I turned to Doug.

  “No,” he said. “Absolutely not! If you want to adopt a baby, we can do it through the proper channels. We can’t get involved in this. If the police find out we’ve taken a kid that doesn’t belong to us, forged a birth certificate . . . if they found out that we knew what happened to that poor woman and didn’t tell them . . . What about her relatives? Her family? It’s just wrong, Beth. You know it is.”

  I looked down at the baby. I knew Doug was right, but God, she was so beautiful. I loved her immediately, I think. She was so defenseless and alone. Her mother was dead; her father didn’t want her—what would happen to her now? I lifted her to my face and breathed in the delicious smell of her scalp. I think I already knew by then that I’d never be able to let her go.

  Oliver seemed to find his voice at last. “All we ask is that you have her tonight. We can’t be seen with her—people will start asking questions. Please, just have her tonight and think about it.”

  Rose caught hold of my hand. “I’m begging you, Beth, please help us.”

  Doug shook his head and I pulled my hand away from Rose’s. “Doug,” I said, “can I talk to you in the kitchen for a moment?”

  Once we’d shut the door behind us, Doug hissed, “There is no way we’re doing this, Beth.”

  “Doug,” I began, but he cut me off.

  “The very idea is insane. We can’t just take in someone else’s child! A woman died tonight. We should tell the police!”

  We must have been in there for half an hour, arguing back and forth. I think I just wore him down in the end. “It’s one night,” I promised him. “Just one night. Let the baby have a good night’s sleep in peace and we’ll decide what to do in the morning. Please, Doug,” I said, “please.” I think he knew that there would be no talking me out of it and eventually, reluctantly he agreed. “One night,” he said. “That’s all.”

  We went back to the living room. “All right,” I said. “We’ll look after her tonight.” I could hardly look at Oliver as he thanked us, his eyes full of shame and gratitude.

  After they had left, Doug and I took care of Lana. We fed her, changed her, and made her a makeshift bed next to ours. She was such a good little soul, so peaceful and quiet. I did with her what I’d never allowed myself to do with any of the babies I’d looked after in the hospital:
I closed my eyes and held her to me and let myself pretend that she was mine. She seemed to fit in the crook of my neck so perfectly; it felt so right to have her snuggled against me.

  When she was sleeping peacefully, I took a deep breath and steeled myself to talk to Doug. “I know the circumstances are awful,” I began cautiously, whispering in the darkness, “but this, surely, is the answer to our prayers. You heard Rose: she’ll get us the necessary paperwork so we can get a birth certificate saying she’s ours. They’ll think Lana died with her mother, that her body was lost at sea. No one need ever know.”

  He kept repeating the same thing, saying it was morally wrong, that we could get into terrible trouble. I thought I’d never change his mind. But when Lana woke a few hours later in the middle of the night, I passed her to him while I went to make up her milk. When I came back, he was sitting on the end of the bed holding her, an expression on his face as he gazed down at her that I’d never seen before. It was a scene I’d imagined so many times throughout those endless years and years of hope and disappointment, and I felt a lump lodge itself in my throat. I sat down next to him and silently passed him the bottle.

  “I was thinking,” he murmured as we watched her drink. “What if you’re right? What if this is our only chance? If we never did manage to have our own, or for some reason couldn’t adopt. What then?” He looked at me. “You’d never forgive me, would you?” He sighed and added, “I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself.”

  I closed my eyes. Could this be true? Could we really be about to do this? Careful not to disturb Lana, I put my arms around him. We both watched as she fell asleep again, her little head with its beautiful thick dark hair on his chest. Our daughter. I felt overcome with happiness.

  The days following our decision were utterly surreal. The practicalities of adjusting to new parenthood, the fear of what would happen if we were discovered, the guilt we felt about her real family, were interspersed with the pure joy of having Lana so suddenly and unexpectedly in our lives. She was absolutely perfect. We decided to call her Hannah after my grandmother, and that was when it suddenly began to feel real, that she was really and forever ours. But there was a huge amount of fear and anxiety too. We had to keep her existence secret from the world while we worked out how to pass her off as our own. Luckily the house we lived in then was down a short lane, set slightly apart from our neighbors, so there was nobody to hear her when she cried. We would take it in turns to drive to a town far away from our little village to buy her formula and nappies.

  We knew we had to come up with a plan. I thought if we were really going to commit to such a huge lie, it had to be to everyone—to all our friends and family—and we would have to move away from the Suffolk village we’d lived in all our lives. I resigned from my job at the hospital. Doug had wanted for some time to expand his building business, so he applied for a loan, and the idea was to move from the area and start again. We began researching villages and areas in Cambridgeshire, the next county, miles away from our village, where no one would know us.

  Two weeks after Hannah came to us, I went to the local pub to have a drink with friends, and broke the news that Doug and I had decided to split up. In the shocked silence, I told them that I was going away for a while to stay with a friend from the hospital while I decided what to do. I knew the gossip would spread like wildfire. Later that night, I took Hannah, drove to a town near the Cambridgeshire village we’d chosen to move to, and stayed in a hotel while I looked for a house to rent. Doug gave notice to our landlord and, a month later, came and joined us.

  My parents had moved to the Lake District after I had married Doug, so the fabrications we had to weave, though difficult, were not impossible. When I announced my “pregnancy” to them, I said that, because of my previous miscarriages, we’d waited four months before telling them. Later we said that as the baby had arrived a month early, she’d had to spend several weeks in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit—a place where only the child’s parents are allowed to visit. Finally, citing problems with the move and so on, we were able to put off their first visit for a further couple of months. Hannah was a naturally very small baby, so when my parents did finally get to meet their grandchild, they didn’t guess that she was in fact far older than we said. It was very difficult—I hated lying to them, but what else could I do? Doug’s own mother had died some years earlier and his father, who lived in Devon, was not the type to be much interested in newborns, so that at least was easier.

  As far as local friends were concerned, I told them that Doug and I had got back together after our split when we’d found out I was pregnant, and we were now living happily together in Cambridgeshire. Yes, I hurt some feelings, burned some bridges, but, well, it was a small price to pay.

  In the event, everything seemed to go our way. I took that as a sign that it was meant to be. I told myself that although it hadn’t happened in the best of circumstances, neither was Nadia’s death our fault. Lana would have had to have been adopted by someone eventually, so why not us, who had waited for so long and so desperately for her? I guess I made myself not think about Hannah’s real-life family, the grandparents who were mourning both her and Nadia’s loss. I read the newspaper reports about Nadia’s suicide and put them away, out of sight, locking my guilt firmly away as I did so.

  So, suddenly there we were: new house, new village, new daughter, new life. God, I was so happy. I thought I had it all, that all my dreams had finally come true. Soon it felt as though we truly were just an ordinary, natural family. Doug was as besotted with her as I was and took to fatherhood right away, doing his fair share of nappies and night feeds, cuddling and playing with her every moment that he could. He was so proud of her; we both were.

  And later, when the small, niggling doubts crept in, I ignored them at first, telling myself that it was nothing, that I was imagining things. Occasionally, when I couldn’t sleep at night and the worry that something wasn’t quite right with Hannah loomed larger, I would torture myself, wondering if her antipathy toward me was because she wasn’t really mine—that she sensed I wasn’t her real mother. I even wondered if I was imagining things because of the guilt I still felt at the dreadful way she’d come into our lives, at all the lies we’d colluded in. But always, at least in the beginning, I’d push the doubts from my mind, because I wanted so badly for it all, at last, to be completely perfect for Doug and me.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SUFFOLK, 2017

  From the hallway, the clock above the stairs struck one. The fire had long since died out; the coldness that seeped into the corners of the room made Clara shiver inside her thin jumper. They were seated now: Clara and Mac on the large and uncomfortable chesterfield, Rose and Oliver in the two creaking armchairs. Clemmy lay on the floor at their feet, emitting the occasional uneasy grumble, her eyebrows shooting up unhappily toward first one, then the other of her owners. Only Tom still stood, his back to the window, listening to his mother speak. He continued to drink steadily, pouring again and again from the bottle of wine, watching Rose grimly from above his glass.

  “We cut all ties with Beth and Doug,” Rose went on. “We all agreed it would be better that way.” Her voice rose imploringly as she looked from one to the other of their faces. “We got on with our lives. What else could we do? The police had rightly concluded Nadia’s death was suicide, assuming she’d died alone, and that . . . that . . . Lana had been lost to sea.” She looked at Tom. “And later, when first you, then your brother came along, we just wanted to put the whole dreadful business behind us.” She paused, seeming to shrink inside herself as she said in a low, fearful voice, “It wasn’t until seven years later that Beth suddenly contacted me out of the blue.”

  “What did she want?” Clara asked.

  “She was hysterical, saying she wanted to go to the police, that we needed to confess everything. It was a horrible shock, as you can imagine. I had no idea why she was s
uddenly so upset. I tried to get her to calm down, but she became so worked up that in the end I agreed to meet her. When I got there, she was still in a state, saying Hannah, as they’d named Lana, had become violent, that she was frightened of her. She said the child had started a fire at her babysitter’s, had hurt her son, that her marriage was falling apart because of it all. She believed Hannah was mentally ill—that she’d inherited her mother’s psychiatric issues—and that now she—Beth—was somehow being punished for deceiving everyone the way we did. I tried to reason with her, but she was beside herself, saying she wanted to go to the police, that she couldn’t stand the guilt anymore and wanted to confess that they’d taken the child illegally. She kept talking about how Nadia had died, how wrong it had been to pass Hannah off as their own. Most of all, she believed Hannah needed professional help, that doctors would need her real medical history. The more I tried to talk her out of it, the more upset she became. I decided that the best thing for me to do was to leave. And I told her not to contact me again.”

  There was complete silence. Clara looked across the room to Oliver, who was still slumped in a chair, his head in his hands as his wife talked.

  “I thought,” Rose continued, “or rather I hoped very much that would be an end to it. But it wasn’t, of course.” She looked up and met Clara’s eye suddenly. “Because Hannah had been there all along, in the kitchen where we were talking, was hiding in the next room, listening to our conversation. She had heard everything Beth and I said. She was seven years old and she knew everything—who her real parents were, how her mother had died. Everything.”

  Clara put her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, that poor kid.”

  Rose glanced at her with the smallest flicker of confusion, almost, Clara thought, as if Hannah’s suffering hadn’t occurred to her in all of this. “I didn’t find out for many years that Hannah had overheard us, not until I saw Beth again,” she went on, “and by then it was far too late. In the meantime she grew up, becoming more and more disturbed, fixated on what she’d learned. She knew the hospital Beth used to work in and managed to track me down there. She became obsessed with Oliver and me, with all of us—her ‘real’ family, as she thought of us by then. After a while she began to skip school, getting the train over here and following Oliver to work, or standing outside the children’s school, becoming more and more resentful.” She turned to Tom. “She saw you kids as having the perfect life, the life that she should be living.”