‘Thanks, Mum, but you’ve helped out enough already. Marcus still has another week’s paternity leave, and anyway, I need to get used to coping on my own at some point.’
‘Yes, but there’s nothing wrong with having a little help, you know. Your body’s been through a major trauma, your hormones are all over the place and your routine’s changed beyond recognition. It all takes a while to get used to.’
She appeared to think about it for a minute, then shook her head. ‘No, I need to . . . I’ll be fine. We’re still getting used to each other, I suppose. Come on, let’s go and set this pud alight.’
We finally managed to settle Toby in his Moses basket and had just started eating when the phone rang. I noticed the almost fearful way Hannah glanced at Toby but mercifully, he stayed asleep.
‘My mum,’ Duncan said. ‘Bound to be.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Earlier than usual, though.’
I smiled. ‘Give her my love.’ Estelle always called on Boxing Day. She went to her widowed sister for Christmas every year, then called us as soon as she got back to tell us how much Gina waffled on about her grandchildren, how the colour of her hair was less and less convincing and how much Gina drank before, during and after Christmas dinner.
‘Hello, Merry Christmas!’ Duncan said cheerily into the handset. ‘Hello?’ he said again. ‘Hello?’ He looked at the phone and then said ‘Hello’ once more before shrugging and hanging up. ‘Probably a wrong number.’
‘Do 1471,’ I said. Hannah looked up sharply and I realised how anxious I sounded. ‘I mean, this is the second time, isn’t it?’
Duncan tapped out the numbers. ‘The caller withheld their number,’ he repeated, putting the handset back in the charger. ‘I’d better ring my mum, just in case.’ No one spoke until we heard him talking to Estelle and explaining why he’d rung her rather than waiting for her to ring us as usual.
*
After lunch, I suggested Hannah and I go for a walk, leaving Duncan and Marcus to finish loading the dishwasher and make the kitchen look less like a bomb had hit it. Hannah put her coat, woolly hat, scarf and mittens on and then she stood at the door with her hands in her pockets while I got my boots on. It was still quite snowy outside. Toby was beginning to stir; I could hear him making little snuffling noises. ‘Aren’t you bringing the baby?’ I picked up my keys from the yellow ceramic bowl that Hannah made at school. Her ‘sunshine bowl’, she called it.
‘What? Oh, yes, I suppose so.’ She took her coat off again, lifted him out of the Moses basket and laid him on the changing mat, then pulled a tiny coat from her bag and started trying to feed his arms into the sleeves without much success. She was biting her lip.
I hesitated for a moment – I didn’t want her to think I was trying to take over, but she looked increasingly exasperated so I asked if she’d like some help. ‘Thanks,’ she sighed as she moved aside so I could get to him. ‘How on earth am I supposed to get him dressed if he keeps wriggling like this? It’s impossible.’
‘Try reaching into the sleeve from the other end rather than trying to push his arm all the way through. Like this.’ I bunched the sleeve up with both hands then gently reached inside the cuff with my fingers and guided Toby’s hand through.
Hannah looked tearful. ‘Why didn’t I think of that? I’m so crap at this.’
‘No, you’re not.’ I put my arms around her. ‘You’re doing fine. There’s no reason you’d know to do that unless somebody told you. An Italian lady I used to work for showed me how to do it when you were tiny; someone else probably showed her.’
She sighed again.
‘Come on, sweetheart. You can’t know everything from the word go, you learn as you go along.’
She nodded but didn’t look at me. Nor did she make any move to pick Toby up.
‘I wish you’d let me do more to help.’ ‘You could take him in the sling, if you like.’ She knew that wasn’t what I meant, but still. ‘Come along, my little pickle.’ I stretched my arms out to lift him and I held him against my chest while Hannah sorted out the complicated wrap-around carrier. Then she clipped Monty’s lead on and we set off .
It was dark now, and we walked in companionable silence, breaking it only occasionally to comment on a pretty Christmas tree in a window, or an over-the-top display of lights. Monty paused every few metres to sniff at something interesting beneath the snow or to lift his leg against a tree. We turned into the narrow walkway that took us alongside the Porter Brook to the General Cemetery, a high stone wall on one side and the snow-covered bank leading down to the water on the other. The soft orange light from the lamp-posts spilled across the snow, giving the scene a slightly Dickensian feel. It started to snow again as we walked up through the cemetery towards the ruined church where we stopped for a moment to watch the flakes falling against a backdrop of ancient headstones and holly trees, complete with berries. I was conscious of the warm nugget of Toby against my chest. It was so quiet, all I could hear was the sound of Monty snuffling in the snow. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I said, but as we stood there watching the silent snow settling like a quilt around us, I was aware of a sudden feeling of desolation. Here I was with my daughter and my new grandson, about to go back to a warm house and a husband who loved me, and yet I felt as though a cold, black fog had enveloped me; the awful sense that nothing was safe. What if I lost all this? What if it was all taken away? I looked over my shoulder and back towards the church, but everything looked the same. Why then, did I feel so unsettled?
CHAPTER FOUR
While Hannah and I were out with the baby on Boxing Day, Duncan and Marcus had cooked up the idea of a small New Year’s Eve gathering. I wasn’t much of a party person, but I found I was enjoying myself, and having lots of friends and family around made up for not being able to celebrate my real birthday. For my fake fiftieth, Duncan took me to Edinburgh; a boutique hotel with an enormous bed, luxury toiletries and fluffy white bathrobes. We did the touristy things – a whisky-tasting, a guided literary walk, a ride in an open-topped bus, and then a meal in a restaurant where the food was so beautiful we weren’t sure whether to eat it or admire it. He said I looked fabulous, that he could hardly believe I was fifty; then he gave me a pair of pearl earrings and told me that marrying me was the best thing he’d ever done. I had to turn away then; I felt nothing short of treacherous. Duncan was a good man, and, although I tried to be a better person these days, I knew I didn’t deserve him.
Hannah was talking to our old friends Marina and Paul. She still had dark circles under her eyes, but she’d put on some make-up, and she was dressed in a purple cable-knit jumper over a green miniskirt with purple tights and black suede boots; she looked a lot better. Marina held her arms out to take the baby and Hannah obliged, then came over to us. ‘Bloody hell,’ she whispered. ‘If one more person tells me how much he looks like his father, I’ll scream.’
‘Well, he does,’ Duncan said and I shot him a look.
‘I had hoped my children would look like me, at least a little bit.’
At that point, Duncan got it. ‘Sorry, Han.’ He parted Hannah’s shoulder. ‘That was insensitive.’
Hannah shrugged. ‘Forget it.’
‘You okay?’
Hannah nodded and managed a small smile, though her face was tense and full of shadows, just like it had been a couple of years ago during that horrible time when they were trying to find out what was wrong, when her sweet young face had been lined with worry and haunted with fear. She’d rung me as soon as they left the consultant’s office and she was crying so much it was difficult to make out what she was saying. ‘They said . . . they said I’ve got . . .’
For one awful moment I thought they’d told her she had something terminal. Fear shot through my body like a steel bolt, pinning me to the spot. ‘Darling, please tell me. What did they say?’
Marcus came on the line. He sounded pretty shaken. ‘They reckon she’s got something called premature ovarian failure. It means that her e
ggs are—’ Then I heard Hannah take the phone back again. ‘Mum, I’m going through the fucking menopause. I’m thirty-one, for fuck’s sake. And my eggs are . . . are dying.’
I felt tears spring to my eyes. ‘Oh Hannah. Oh darling, I don’t know what to say.’ I could hear her trying to stifle her tears. ‘They say it can run in families, but you managed to get pregnant when you were forty-three. Hang on.’ I heard her blow her nose, then sigh. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . I shouldn’t have brought it up.’
I tried to gather myself; I was still trying to take it in. ‘No, no, it’s fine.’
‘Mum, can we come round?’
They sat in the kitchen, pale and red-eyed from crying. Monty positioned himself at Hannah’s feet and laid his head in her lap while she absent-mindedly played with his ears. I made tea, remembering to add lots of sugar. Once, when Hannah was five, she pirouetted off the table in our bedsit and broke her collarbone. The landlady drove us to the hospital, stayed with us and drove us home again, and then while I put Hannah to bed, she made me a cup of tea. ‘There we are, love, nice and sweet.’ In a still-shaky voice, I thanked her but told her I didn’t take sugar. ‘You do today,’ she said. And I remembered Scott making us both sugary tea that time all those years before, and I remembered that it helped.
‘How old was your mum when she died?’ Hannah said, sipping the tea and grimacing at the sweetness.
‘Forty-one.’
‘And did she . . . ? Was she still . . .’
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I sighed. ‘Mothers and daughters didn’t discuss things like that back then. And my mum had other problems, as you know, so it was difficult to talk about anything.’ I felt dizzy so I pulled out a chair and sat down. Nothing could change the situation, so what was the point of talking about family histories?
‘I’m glad we can talk about things,’ Hannah said. ‘Most of my friends just moan about their mums.’
‘I’m glad, too.’ I took a gulp of my tea, burning my mouth. ‘So . . . is there anything they can do? I mean to help you have a baby?’ I‘d often half hoped that Hannah wouldn’t want kids, because much as I loved the idea of grandchildren, I couldn’t shake off the crippling anxiety every time I thought about her giving birth. My greatest fear had always been of losing Hannah – my precious only child. I couldn’t bear seeing her like this. I remembered my own misery each month when my period came, and when it didn’t come, the delirious happiness, followed by the utter despair when the pains started a few weeks later.
‘Seems like we’ve got two options,’ she said. ‘We can adopt, but there’s a long wait for babies, or we could try to find an egg donor.’
‘But . . .’
‘IVF. We’d still use Marcus’s sperm, but my eggs are no good, apparently, so we’d need donated eggs.’
‘Which is expensive,’ Marcus added, ‘ and might not work.’ He was leaning forward in his chair, head down, twisting his car keys round and round in his hands. He was the same age as Hannah but he looked incredibly young and vulnerable at that moment.
We all sat in silence while I digested this. Hannah appeared to have stopped crying, but every now and again she swiped at her face as another tear slid down it.
‘We’ll help with the money,’ I said. ‘If you want to go ahead?’
She nodded and reached for Marcus’s hand. ‘We do,’ she said, ‘we really do.’ Tearful again but smiling, she got up and put her arms round me. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
Duncan had agreed, of course. He’d just been made a partner in the practice, which was on the outskirts of Sheffield and had business from farms and riding stables as well as the usual cats, dogs and hamsters, so he’d had quite a big pay rise, and he was delighted to have something worthwhile to do with it. And when, after the first attempt failed, the second resulted in a single pregnancy that was still perfectly healthy four months on, Hannah’s happiness was the supreme reward. Pregnancy suited her, too, especially in the later stages when she positively glowed with health. The way she looked, the way she carried herself in those last few weeks was almost majestic.
Looking at her now, it was hard to believe that this was the same person as that smiling, energetic young woman.
Someone called to Duncan from the kitchen and he went off to do hosting duties. ‘Marina says,’ Hannah continued, ‘that all babies look like their fathers. She says it’s something to do with nature protecting the young, or something.’
‘I read that somewhere, too. The idea is that, if a child looks like its father, the father has proof of his paternity and is more likely to stay around to protect the child, less likely to bugger off and leave the mother to it.’
Hannah nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘Do I look like my father?’
This floored me for a second; she hadn’t mentioned her father for years. An image of that man in Marks & Spencer’s the other day flirted across my mind. He reminded me so much of Scott that I found I’d been thinking about the past much more than usual. I looked at Hannah, her hair, which she’d had cut into a sleek bob before she had Toby, was dark but not coal-black like Scott’s had been; her tall, slim build was the same though, and so were the almond-shaped eyes, cornflower-blue rather than the brown you always expected with dark hair. I swallowed. ‘Yes, you do a bit.’ I braced myself for her to ask more but she just nodded, then rolled her eyes when she realised that Toby was crying again and went off to see to him.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sometimes I almost forgot Duncan wasn’t Hannah’s real dad. Partly wishful thinking, I suppose – I wanted him to be her father; I wanted to forget Scott had ever existed. Hannah had started calling Duncan ‘Daddy’ when she was eight or nine. We’d been married for over a year, but we’d only just moved into our first real home together. We were all in the sitting room, still surrounded by boxes of books and CDs and videos, eating the pizza we’d had delivered. Hannah wrinkled her nose as she looked at her slice of pizza. ‘It’s got mushrooms on it,’ she said in disgust. ‘I hate mushrooms.’
‘I used to hate mushrooms as well.’ Duncan’s face was deadly serious. ‘When I was a little girl like you.’
Hannah listened in earnest for a moment, then grinned. ‘You’re silly.’
‘Come on then, pipsqueak.’ He held his plate out. ‘Give us them here. I’ll swap you for the capers – you like capers, don’t you?’
Hannah’s face fell and she shook her head before wrinkling her nose again and announcing, ‘They’re like bogies!’
‘Yum!’ Duncan said, picking up a caper and popping it into his mouth. ‘That’s why I love ‘em.’
‘Yuk!’ Hannah squealed, but she was giggling.
Later, when Duncan and I had gone back to the unpacking, Hannah came down in her pyjamas. Usually, she’d say goodnight to Duncan, then I’d go up with her to read her a story and tuck her in. But that night when she shuffled into the room with her thumb in her mouth, she came over to where I was kneeling on the floor unpacking a box of books, took her thumb out of her mouth and leaned across so that her mouth was almost against my ear. ‘Mummy,’ she whispered.
‘Yes?’ I whispered back.
‘Can Duncan come and tuck me in tonight?’
‘What?’ I whispered in mock horror. ‘Instead of me?’
She shook her head vigorously. ‘No. And you.’
I smiled. ‘Only teasing. Yes, I’m sure he will. You go and hop into bed and we’ll be up in a minute.’
She nodded. ‘Okay. And Mummy.’ She was still whispering, although it was a bit of a stage whisper by now.
‘Yes, darling?’
‘Duncan’s my daddy-by-marriage, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. He’s your stepdad.’ We’d gone through this before the wedding, with the help of some useful story books. Then last year, when her friend Amber’s mum had had another baby, we’d had a bit of a birds and bees discussion in which I’d explained that her biological father lived a long way away and that we hadn’t seen him since she was a baby. I wasn�
��t sure how well she understood why he was so far away, but what she did understand was that Duncan did all the things a dad would do, and that he loved her.
‘My stepdad.’ She nodded again, earnestly. ‘So am I allowed to call him Daddy?’
‘Oh darling, of course you’re allowed. Do you really want to?’
She nodded.
‘Well, I think Duncan would be very pleased to have you call him Daddy.’ I smiled as I glanced at Duncan, who by this time was looking curious as to what conspiracies were taking place on this side of the room.
‘Okay,’ she whispered again, and then she walked over to Duncan and said, clearly and confidently, ‘Daddy, will you come and tuck me in, please?’
I watched Duncan swallow and cough to disguise the break in his voice. ‘Course I will, pipsqueak,’ he said, ruffling her hair. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
‘Bloody hell,’ he said after she’d trotted happily back upstairs, thumb in mouth. ‘That’s a turn-up for the books.’
‘I think you’ve cracked it.’ I put my arms around him.
He squeezed me back and kissed my head.
*
‘Come on, everybody,’ Duncan shouted. ‘Can we all move into the garden, please. Time for some big bangs!’ We weren’t waiting until midnight to do the fireworks because it would have been too late for the younger children, and Estelle needed to go to bed before then anyway. She was nearly ninety, but still stood almost as tall as Duncan and never appeared in public without carefully applied make-up and a string of pearls. People were surprised when they learned that she was his mother. Duncan was, Estelle always said, a change baby - unexpected, but very welcome. We all shuffled outside. There was still snow here and there but it wasn’t as bitterly cold as it had been recently. Duncan and Marcus were down at the end of the garden by the shed, and we all stood in huddles on the terrace with our drinks, waiting while they set up the first fireworks. There was a scratching sound on the glass behind me and I turned to see Monty sitting the other side of the sliding door in his I’m a good dog’ position. ‘No,’ I shouted through the glass. ‘You won’t like this; go and lie down.’ His brown eyes looked up at me as he listened intently to what I was saying, then he turned and padded back to his bed where he slumped down and rested his head on his paws with a resigned expression. He did everything I asked him to because he trusted me implicitly. Sometimes, even the dog could make me feel unworthy.
The Secrets We Left Behind Page 3
