More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  We were going out to lunch. I arrived at the offices of Hatton & Baker to find Sara on the phone. Michelle was off for the day and another secretary offered me a seat in Sara’s office. Everyone who worked there had heard about what had happened. Now they sneaked glances at me as I waited for Sara to finish her business call. She put down the receiver and looked across at me without speaking.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘Fine,’ she smiled. We greeted one another with a kiss, she grabbed her jacket and we set off together for a little Italian restaurant round the corner. As we walked towards Piccadilly, I noticed how the white jeans she was wearing emphasised her long, rangy legs. Martin’s legs.

  At the restaurant, we were shown to a table and handed menus. More interested in studying each other, we scarcely glanced at them. It felt, oddly, like being on a date. We were both curious about one another and full of wonder at what had happened to us, agreeing that it felt a little like falling in love. I invited Sara to choose whatever she would like from the menu, suddenly aware that I was sounding like a frequently absent parent trying to make up with a treat for the lack of attention paid to a child. How on earth could I ever compensate for twenty years’ absence from Sara’s life? It dawned on me then that I hadn’t the faintest idea of my daughter’s tastes in food, or in anything else, come to that.

  I was thrown off balance for a moment. There was no plot, no script for this relationship. No correct etiquette, even. But a glass of wine broke the ice. Soon we were chatting away animatedly like old friends. Or was it new friends? It was hard to classify our feelings at this point. Each meeting stirred up strong emotions and yet we didn’t know each other. We were on a journey to one another.

  When I offered a polite ‘grazie’ to the Italian waiter who took our order, Sara asked if I spoke Italian. I told her that, as a result of my adventures aboard the Golden Sunset, my Spanish was better.

  ‘I speak a bit of Spanish too,’ she said. She had told me by the Pagoda that she had spent time in Spain. I wondered whether this was where she had been taken on the holiday for which my consent had been requested before the adoption papers were signed. But I didn’t ask that now. Instead, I just watched her as she talked, fascinated by every feature, still not quite able to comprehend that this was my living, breathing, grown-up girl.

  In every gesture, every intonation she is familiar to me. She is buoyed up by my father’s confidence. She blinks with Martin’s long eyelashes and my mother’s smile creeps across her face. My own voice speaks to me but the eyes are Bridie’s—big and blue. Poor Bridie. I think of her sadness on the day I went into hospital; how she had wept at the thought that she would never know her first grandchild. And yet, by some miracle, two decades later, that grandchild is here, chatting away to me across a table in a cheerful trattoria. My daughter is the sum of so many people and yet she is a different person. Her own person. Sara.

  We strolled back to the office, saying not goodbye, but arriverderci!

  A thank-you card soon arrived in the post. Inside the envelope were photographs, two of Sara as a teenager and one of her as a little girl, standing in a sunny garden. It was the garden I had always imagined. From the picture, my daughter looks out at me across the years, head turned to one side, a coy smile for the camera, her long hair tied up in a platinum blonde ponytail. This is the photograph I had waited for all this time. Now Sara had given it to me herself.

  I proudly showed the snapshots to friends, acquaintances, anyone who demonstrated the slightest interest.

  I would soon be leaving Sara for a while. Tina was to be married in Jamaica and had very generously bought me an air ticket so that I could be at the wedding. We were all to spend nearly a fortnight on the island, so the next few days were filled with frenzied activity both at work and at home. I hired an outfit for the occasion, packed a suitcase and made the time to write another letter, this one to Sara’s mum. I knew how hard the situation must be for her and I hoped that if I sent it now, shortly before leaving the country, by the time she received my letter, the knowledge that I was thousands of miles away might give her some space in which to read it and decide how, or whether, to reply, without feeling under any pressure to do either.

  It was a hard letter to write, not least because my daughter’s mother was a stranger to me. I fully acknowledged that Sara was, and always would be, her daughter. I wrote that I knew she must be proud of her, and that she should be proud of herself, too, for bringing her up so well. I understood if she wanted to keep her distance. The reason I was writing was simply to thank her, to recognise a connection that would always be between us and to ask if, when I returned, she would like to meet, if only for a quick cup of tea. I phrased my letter carefully. I didn’t want her to feel I was invading her world, just that I was holding out my hand to her. If she preferred not to take it, that was fine.

  A week later I was in St Mary’s Bay, Jamaica. Tina and her husband-to-be, both perfectionists, had planned a huge itinerary of fabulous activities for their guests. We rafted the Rio Grande, slid down the Dunn’s River Falls and wandered through the rooms of Noël Coward’s house, Firefly. The wedding itself, held in the grounds of a fifteenth-century-style Venetian villa with gardens full of hibiscus, was simply magical, more like a movie set than anything I had known in real life. I thought of the romantic films I had seen so many times with my mother, of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. If only my mum could have seen me now. When she was alive I had always brought back holiday souvenirs for her and entertained her with tales of my adventures. I could buy nothing for her now but I could take something home for Sara. In a bustling Jamaican market I came across a trinket box topped with a small painting by a local artist. Perfect.

  On the flight home I thought about the other person caught up in our emotional triangle and wondered how my letter had been received. Back in the tiny flat on Merrow Street, I sifted through the mail on my doormat. There was no reply from Sara’s mother. I understood completely. I knew what it was like to experience two worlds colliding.

  Once I’d settled back into my London routine, I invited Sara to a party, an industry ball hosted by the Guild of Film Stuntmen. I took her to Debbie’s flat in Notting Hill, where she met Debbie, Jools and Tina and we got ready for the do, all girls together, sipping wine as we slipped into party clothes in front of a bedroom mirror. Separated as we were by only seventeen years, in many ways we were now behaving more like long-lost sisters than mother and daughter. As we stood side by side, checking our outfits in a bedroom mirror, the other girls gathered round us and studied our reflections. We looked like twins, they said, one dark and one fair, like photographic positives and negatives. Sara borrowed my make-up and called me Julie. Another woman was Mum, and always would be: the woman who had nursed her through measles and chicken pox and put up with outbreaks of teenage rebellion. I wondered whether they had been as bad as mine. Had my daughter pelted student teachers with wet clay as soon as their backs were turned? All I knew at that stage was that Sara had studied for a B. Tech Business Diploma and was keen to become an actors’ agent. At her age, I’d been certain of nothing except what I didn’t want.

  As we set off for the party, Sara linked her arm in mine. We were finding our way, inch by inch, towards a comfortable place in each other’s hearts. Two hours later, music was playing and I was dancing with my daughter. Flashbulbs popped all around us. New photographs to cherish.

  Only weeks after Sara and I had found one another, the offices of Hatton & Baker were disbanded. The partners were going their separate ways, Michelle to start up her own agency representing writers and directors. I realised that if I had left it even a short while longer to approach Michelle and make an appointment to see her, my daughter would never have been in place to read my name upon a script. How narrow the window of opportunity had been! I had been fully occupied by the gargantuan challenge of making my housing association flat fit to live in and could so
easily have put it off. But something had been driving me on to draw together all the threads of my life, in preparation for this moment. Truly, it had been the right time.

  Sara left Jermyn Street, too. Her boss asked if she would like to carry on working for him in an office at his home. It transpired that he lived in Camberwell, just five minutes in the car from my flat in Merrow Street. It was a measure of our growing familiarity that when she visited me now for supper, I knew what she liked to eat. Sometimes she would stay over rather than risk a late-night journey home, and in the mornings I’d make tea for her, pausing, cup in hand, to steal a glimpse of her as she lay sleeping in the living room. Could this beautiful girl really be the same tiny child who had slept beside me in a hospital cot, the same baby I had placed in another woman’s arms? The years had made a woman of Sara, too, but, amazingly, she was back with me once more, curled up on my sofa bed.

  On 3 June 1991, three women sat at a table in London’s Ivy restaurant. All around us, serious-looking men were talking business, but the mood on our table was celebratory. It was Sara’s twenty-first birthday. I had brought with me a large fabric bag stuffed with individually wrapped gifts. As Sara opened them excitedly, Michelle caught my eye. She knew I was still trying vainly to compensate for the past, but she simply smiled and called me Mary Poppins. She was, after all, part of this miracle, a fairy godmother to our reunion, and this was a day for rejoicing in it. We raised our glasses for a toast. Surely life couldn’t get any better?

  The fairytale quality of those days was soon to be brought to an end. Within the next three years I would lose my two oldest friends to terminal illnesses. First it was Mark, my soulmate over some seventeen years. As his condition deteriorated I spent as much time with him as I could but when he died a year later, in August 1992, the shock was still immense and I was inconsolable. By this stage, Seb was also beginning to suffer worrying health problems. I could not understand how, having been blessed by fortunate coincidence so often in recent years, I was now confronting a double tragedy. I was completely winded by all the emotional extremes I had experienced in such a short period

  I had discovered after Mark died that he had left me some money from an insurance policy in his will. It was a large sum, more than I had ever seen in my whole life, but I felt bad about accepting it, as if I were somehow profiting from his death. It was a time of great upheaval, with gains overshadowed by terrible loss.

  One day, I found myself crying in my car on the way to work. Once I had started, I was unable to stop.

  I needed help to get through this and I embarked upon several weeks of counselling. When it was over, friends convinced me to honour Mark’s gift. I decided to use the money to buy his Peckham flat from his estate. I was advised that the best way of handling this was for the property to be offset against the sum he had left me and transferred directly to me from the estate. So I never actually took possession of all that money—but I certainly reaped its rewards.

  Tina, Jools and Debbie had put the Knowledge Production Company up for sale and we had produced the last edition of the directory that autumn, so I had been gearing myself up to looking for another full-time job. By enabling me to live rent-free, Mark’s bequest liberated me from the nine-to-five treadmill and handed me the opportunity to try to make a living from writing. Now that I had the luxury of time, I could finish projects I had started and build up a body of work. It was the best gift my dear friend could have given me.

  I planned to move into Mark’s flat, a spacious upperfloor conversion in a Regency-style house in Glengall Road, Peckham, in the New Year of 1993. Sara was in sentimental mood as I packed away my final bits and pieces at Merrow Street.

  ‘It’s like the end of an era,’ she said, ‘This is the place where we got to know one another.’

  The sofa bed she had slept on had been given to someone in greater need of it and my little car was stacked to the gills with everything I owned. Late one January evening, I left Merrow Street for the last time, drove the car, suspension almost scraping the tarmac, to Glengall Road and let myself into Mark’s flat.

  His things were still there, all around me: paintings and prints on the walls, photographs in frames. A pen lay on the table and a jacket hung on the back of a chair as if at any moment he might step into the room and carry on with his life. But he wasn’t going to do that; instead, I was taking over the space he had left behind. I poured myself a drink and sat down on the sofa. So many times we had sat here together but now there was only me. I caught sight of my reflection, thrown back at me by the darkening glass of the bare windows across the room. I was resting one arm against the sofa, right knee bent, right ankle on my left knee. This wasn’t how I sat. It was how Mark always used to sit.

  The realisation brought me up short. I remembered the time, soon after my father’s death, when I had sprawled on the sofa in the way he always did, throwing my shoes into the same corner of the room. I tried to make sense of this. Does the absence of those we love become so unbearable that we are compelled to try to take their place? Or is it that, in fleeting moments and in some unfathomable way, the dead may sometimes inhabit us, guiding us from within? That evening I allowed myself to imagine that, although my parents had been lost to me at such a young age, they might yet have been able to influence me in a way they never could while they were alive. Perhaps they had steered me towards Sara—or her towards me. Perhaps Mark, too, might yet guide me in some new direction.

  That year, I settled down to focus on my writing and was at long last able to produce a collection of scripts that Michelle could show to film and television companies as examples of my work. When the bank account needed a boost I would take on other assignments—I did some video casting with Debbie and had a job briefly with a film producer—but my principal workplace was my desk at Glengall Road. For the first time in my life I had a garden, too, shared with my downstairs neighbours, young guys who spent a lot of time clubbing so were largely nocturnal. With some help from Mark’s mum and dad, I threw myself into taking care of it.

  One day Michelle called me to give me some good news. She had arranged for me to meet someone who was looking for new writers for a television drama series.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked.

  ‘EastEnders.’

  Good news indeed. I had never been much interested in television soaps, but EastEnders was the exception to the rule—I’d become hooked on it after my return to London in 1988. Within the fictional Albert Square I found elements that resonated with my childhood: bold, engaging characters who struggled with economic or family problems in a world bordered by a pub, a launderette and a bustling street market. Critics sometimes complained that storylines were ‘depressing’, but to me this was drama dealing with life as it is, not how we’d like it to be. This was definitely my kind of show.

  The producer I was to see at the BBC Elstree studios was Jane Fallon, now better known as a successful novelist and the partner of Ricky Gervais. Coincidentally, she had once worked at Hatton & Baker.

  At the studio gates I was handed an identity badge and asked to sign my name in a visitors’ book. Jane had arranged to meet me in the canteen and I headed straight there, catching sight, en route, of faces so familiar I almost said hello to them—until I realised they belonged to Walford’s Ian Beale and Pauline Fowler.

  Sitting down with a cup of tea, I spotted Pat Butcher’s son, the recalcitrant David Wicks, at the salad counter. I even offered him a smile as he passed me: if I never got to work on this show, at least I had made contact with one of my favourite characters.

  When Jane arrived she told me she had enjoyed reading the scripts Michelle had sent her and wanted to start me on a ‘shadow’ scheme. This would involve writing a dummy EastEnders episode and working on subsequent drafts with an editor, just as I would if it were going to be transmitted. In reality, however, I would be ‘shadowing’ another writer, who would be producing the real script. I discovered that the guy I would be shadowing was some
one I had met on the residential writers’ course I’d attended in Devon.

  I left the studios with a head full of ideas, a bagful of information on the history of the programme and its characters and a sheaf of scripts to digest. The firstever episode, broadcast in 1985, had opened with Arthur Fowler, Den Watts and Ali Osman breaking down a door to find an elderly neighbour close to death in a stinking sitting room. Reg Cox hadn’t been seen by his neighbours for the past three days. Now, as they watched him being taken off to hospital, the residents of Albert Square revealed themselves in a dialogue about the nature of community that dovetailed, realistically and entertainingly, with everyday conversations about pregnancy and pease pudding. I loved every line, but I was daunted by the prospect of writing such scenes myself.

  A week or so later, however, I had managed to complete my shadow episode. My editor made only a few tweaks and the writer of the real episode joked that she should transmit mine instead, save him a job and he and I could share his fee. Suddenly I was writing my own episodes for transmission and working regularly on what would become Britain’s most popular soap.

  When I joined the show, it was going out only twice a week and I was one of around thirty drama writers contributing either one or both of the week’s episodes. We attended regular meetings at which, fuelled by endless cups of coffee and cigarettes, we decided the fates of well-loved characters or despised villains. At that time, it could take up to three months to complete a single episode for filming. Several drafts would be required, often to accommodate new story developments, cast illness or general continuity problems between programmes.

  The first episode I wrote for transmission concerned the tensions between a young Michelle and the rest of the Fowler family as she strove to bring up her illegitimate daughter. I sensed that writing for this show would prove cathartic, and so it proved. I drew inspiration from my childhood for eccentric characters like Dot Cotton and Jack Branning, who were not so far removed from Aunt Carrie and Uncle Will, and used my own emotional experience to judge the complex reactions of David Wicks on discovering that he was the natural father of Bianca Jackson. When Bianca’s younger sister, Sonia, gave birth to a baby girl who was subsequently adopted, I had no need to call upon my imagination.