The Other Daughter

by Caroline Bishop

  JUNE 2016 Montreux, Switzerland

  JESS

  I smooth down the wrinkles on my shirt and run my fingers through my tangled hair. The back of my neck is slick with sweat. It’s probably only 25 degrees, but the sun feels even stronger after the grey, humid day I left behind in London. It’s just a few hours since I was there, but already it’s as though I’ve stepped into another life. Back home, right now, commuters are dodging puddles whilst running for the tube, heading home on a crammed Northern Line train that smells of cheap burgers and wet dog and armpits. But after only a short plane journey, an hour’s train ride and a ridiculously expensive taxi up a steep hill from the station, I’m standing on a doorstop in Montreux in the blazing sun, looking out over a vast lake fringed by hazy mountains and dotted with sailboats, as if the tube and puddles don’t exist at all.

  I watch the taxi drive off down the hill and rummage in my handbag for a pocket mirror. I dust off the crumbs and give it a rub until I can see a square of my face in it. Dark smudges under my eyes. A spot brewing on my chin. Nose red from the heat. I look older, wearier, than I did when I picked up this little carved mirror from a Thai market stall on my honeymoon five years ago. Hardly surprising. I lick my finger and rub the mascara from under my eyes. There’s little else I can do about my appearance right now. I ring the doorbell.

  ‘You made it! Bienvenue. Welcome, Jessica.’ The woman sticks out her hand. ‘I’m Julia.’ I see glossy dark hair and olive skin. She’s wearing a vivid pink cardigan – in this heat? – over a cream camisole, with black cropped trousers. I smell her perfume when I step forward to shake her hand, my sticky palms meeting her cool skin. ‘We’re so pleased to have you here.’ Her accent is lyrical, singsong, and makes me smile back.

  ‘I’m glad to be here,’ I say. ‘Please call me Jess.’

  I wheel my suitcase along the tiled floor of a corridor and into the main room, a large open-plan kitchen-living-room that’s probably bigger than my entire flat in Peckham. I take in two plush, cream sofas, a capacious Bosch fridge with one of those ice-maker thingies I’ve always coveted, and a painting on the wall that’s the sort of abstract stuff Patrick likes to mock: two swirls of red and a blue dot. Bet it cost a fortune. To the right, sliding glass doors lead out onto a terrace with a table and chairs beneath the shade of a tree. Beyond, I can see houses dotting the slope for half a mile down to the lakeshore, where a ferry is just sliding into port, a white V dissolving in the water behind it. On the far side of the lake, mountaintops are etched against the sky.

  I’ve never even owned a place with a garden, let alone a view like this.

  In Peckham, the bedroom looks out over a patchwork quilt of small gardens belonging to the neighbours, while the living room faces the road and the row of Georgian houses the other side, unaffected by the Second World War bombs that took out our side of the street, later replaced with solid but uninspiring apartment blocks.

  ‘Better to live in the ugly house rather than have to look at it,’ Patrick had said when he’d convinced me that third-floor flat should become our first home together. I wonder if my tenant now thinks the same. I wonder if Patrick’s found himself a nicer place.

  I take a step forward, drawn to the scene. ‘Wow. That’s amazing.’

  Julia laughs. ‘Go out if you want to.’

  I step through the door onto the terrace and Julia joins me. We stand there for a moment, both gazing at the view. Down below, the sun glints off the water and I hear a bass rhythm coming from a tourist ferry – some kind of party boat, perhaps. I can’t think of anything to say and it strikes me that this is like an awkward first date. Something about her poise, the confidence oozing from her, makes me feel I’m likely to say the wrong thing.

  ‘Is this your first time in Switzerland?’ she asks, and I feel relief that the silence is broken.

  I nod. ‘Is all of it this pretty?’

  She laughs. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ She proffers a packet of cigarettes and I notice her nails are beautifully manicured. ‘Do you smoke?’

  I smile and take one in answer. I think how disapproving Patrick was about it, and how I actually managed to give up for a time, back when we were trying – that awful word. But in the last few months I’ve needed it more than ever.

  ‘We only smoke out here. And I’d prefer you not to do it when the kids are around, okay?’

  I nod again. ‘I want to give up anyway.’

  Julia smiles. ‘Don’t we all?’ She slides into one of the wooden chairs and invites me to do the same. ‘You’ll meet Léa and Luca soon. Michel has taken them to the zoo, but they should be back in about half an hour.’ She looks at her watch. ‘And you’ll have tomorrow to settle in – I’m not expecting you to start immediately. But from Monday we will both be at work so they’re all yours.’ She inhales on her cigarette and I notice, with an unexpected sense of satisfaction, tiny lines appear around her mouth.

  ‘I’ve prepared rough lesson plans,’ I say. ‘But of course I’ll adapt to what you want us to do and what suits them best.’

  Julia waves the smoke away from our faces. ‘The main thing is to get them speaking more. I want them to go back to school in the fall with a higher level of English than they have now. How you achieve that is up to you.’

  ‘Right. I’ll do my best.’

  ‘You don’t have to do formal lessons. You will have a budget and you can take them out, explore, do things. There’s a lot nearby for kids. I’ve put some tourist brochures in your room. And of course you don’t know the area, so it’s a chance for you to get to know it too and have fun. It’s summer, n’est-ce pas?’

  Excitement flickers inside me, a long-dormant feeling unfurling like a leaf in spring. I think how reluctant I was when Maggie first touted the idea of me doing this. My godmother was usually right about most things, but I had serious doubts about this particular suggestion. Did I really want to take a job looking after someone else’s children? It felt like rubbing my face in it. But I was a teacher, I already spent my life around kids, so surely I could cope with a couple more? And I needed to do something with my semi-enforced sabbatical from St Mary’s instead of sitting in Maggie’s garden drinking endless cups of tea. Plus, the money was good.

  But, really, it wasn’t any of that. It was Switzerland. The place I’d imagined in my head for the past two years, ever since those tests threw up so many questions; the place I now felt compelled to be, in the hope that it might provide me with some answers.

  ‘I’m still not sure why you need me, though,’ I say. ‘I mean, your English seems fantastic.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Julia says, and I can tell she’s pleased. ‘But we’re not native English speakers and we don’t speak it at home. The kids learn it at school, but I thought employing a native teacher over the summer holidays would give them the…’

  ‘Upper hand?’

  ‘Exactly. We want them to get a good start in life. English is so important.’

  I think of my basic French, which never got past ‘Où est la gare’ and ‘Je voudrais un café s’il vous plaît’.

  A tune echoes in the back of my mind: Mum, at her laptop, humming a French song to herself, and I feel the familiar ache.

  * * *

  A key turns in the lock and I hear a gabble of voices in French chatter their way down the corridor and into the living room.

  ‘Elle est arrivée, elle est arrivée!’ The girl is a miniature version of her mother. Dark hair in a long plait down her back. Deep brown eyes. Skinny. Picture-pretty.

  ‘En anglais,’ Julia says.

  ‘Hello,’ the girl says to me. ‘My name is Léa.’ I say hello back and suppress the thought that always comes to me when I meet someone else’s kids: if I’d had a daughter, would she have looked like me?

  ‘And this is our son, Luca.’ Julia nods to a little boy who comes up to stand shyly behind Léa.

  ‘How do you do, Luca?’ I say, and he giggles and turns away from me, burrowing his face into t
he legs of a tall man who enters the room after the children. They exchange a few words in French before the man steps round his son and onto the terrace to shake my hand. ‘Don’t worry about him, he’s always shy with new people. I’m Michel. Bienvenue. Good to meet you.’

  ‘And you.’ He looks a bit older than Julia and yet he has the same poised, unflustered demeanour. Quite a feat after spending a day at the zoo with two under sevens.

  ‘I’m glad you made it. Was the flight okay? I heard there were some delays on the trains today.’

  ‘Fine, thanks. I didn’t have any problems. Doesn’t transport here always run on time?’

  ‘That’s a myth,’ Michel says. He bends down to kiss Julia, putting his left hand on her shoulder. She reaches up and squeezes his hand and I see their wedding rings – matching gold bands. My ring finger got so used to being occupied that sometimes I think I’m still wearing it, the way amputees get phantom pains after they no longer have the limb.

  ‘How would you know, you never take the train! He drives to work, while I get the train.’ Julia rolls her eyes. ‘But it’s true, they are late sometimes.’

  Their ease with each other is so familiar. That was Patrick and me, once, before everything.

  ‘Shall we open a bottle?’ Julia flashes Michel a smile. He nods, then squeezes himself through the kids who are still staring at me from the terrace doors.

  ‘You like animals?’ Léa asks in precise but heavily accented English.

  ‘Very much.’

  Léa claps her hands. ‘We go to the zoo again with you?’

  I look at Julia and she nods. ‘Absolutely,’ I say. ‘You can show me your favourite animals.’

  ‘What’s your favourite animal, Léa?’ Julia says.

  ‘Les éléphants.’

  ‘Ah, me too,’ I say, and she beams back.

  ‘Éléphant, éléphant,’ she chants as she runs away from us into the living room, Luca chasing after her.

  ‘They are a bit excited today,’ Julia says. ‘First day of the holidays. Eight weeks off. They will calm down.’

  ‘No problem.’ I think of Nicky in Year 9 at St Mary’s who set fire to the boys’ toilets on the final day of term before Easter. ‘They seem great.’

  Michel returns to the terrace with a bottle and three glasses. ‘To welcome you.’ He smiles. ‘This is local. A Chasselas from Lavaux, just over there.’ He pours the wine with one hand and gestures to our right with the other. In the distance I see vines strung in orderly terraces along the hillside.

  I didn’t know Switzerland had vineyards.

  Excitement flickers again, sputtering into life like a creaky old banger. Not for the wine, but for the prospect of discovering so many more things I didn’t know about this place. I have eight weeks to do things that are new. Eight weeks away from the flat that held me prisoner with memories, away from the job that failed to distract me from myself, away from the hollowness of so many endings.

  Maggie was right about this. I need to be here. I need a temporary respite from everything back home in a brand-new country – and of course it had to be this country.

  FEBRUARY 1976 London, UK

  SYLVIA

  After a reluctant Saturday afternoon in the office, Sylvia squeezed herself onto a packed tube carriage. Over the shoulder of a fellow passenger, so close she could see dandruff speckling his dark coat, her eye caught a story on the front page of The Times:

  STARS LINE UP FOR LAST NIGHT AT OLD VIC

  After nearly 13 years, the National Theatre Company takes its final bow at the Old Vic tonight in view of its move to…

  The doors opened at Embankment and Sylvia was propelled out of the tube and up into the cold, early evening air. She took the steps up to Hungerford Bridge and there it was on the other side: the Denys Lasdun building, which was to be Maggie’s new workplace, its Brutalist towers an unapologetic presence on the South Bank. She walked across the bridge, down Waterloo Road and into The Cut, breathing in the buzz of a city supercharged by Saturday night fever.

  London always filled her with such excitement. It was a living, breathing, capricious thing, with all the unpredictability of an errant teen, and she adored the sense of possibility it offered. It flooded her body like a drug, one she’d badly needed after growing up in the Home Counties, where the only possibilities were a Saturday job as a waitress in a cafe followed by a warm white wine in the George & Dragon, thanks to a landlord who turned a blind eye to minors.

  But tonight her excitement about her new commission and her best friend’s final show as an usher at the Old Vic was dampened by her still-lurching stomach and a nagging voice in her head telling her: this isn’t food poisoning, and you know it.

  The foyer of the Old Vic was packed. Smoke curled up to the ceiling, enveloping the chandelier in a haze, and the room hummed with an energy born of the collective anticipation of hundreds of people. As she weaved her way through the crowd, she was impressed to spot the great actress Sybil Thorndike, still turning heads at ninety-three, while the Chancellor, Denis Healey, stood at the bar talking to another besuited man Sylvia didn’t recognise. She caught Jim’s eye and waved, and the news was out of her almost as soon as she’d reached him.

  ‘Switzerland?’ Jim leant forward as though he hadn’t heard her properly.

  ‘Isn’t it exciting?’

  ‘It’s bloody brilliant, Syl. Roger finally caved to your genius. But what are you writing about, the origins of fondue?’

  She slapped him lightly on the arm and smiled. ‘As if.’ She took a drag on her cigarette and blew it out slowly, savouring the moment of revelation. ‘Women’s rights, five years on from national suffrage.’

  It wasn’t often she rendered Jim speechless. She put her head back and blew out smoke to the ceiling. ‘Your face is a picture.’

  He laughed. ‘I never thought Roger would go for that. Well done, Syl, I’m impressed.’ He held out his glass. ‘To my fabulous fiancée.’

  She clinked her gin and tonic against his. ‘Thanks, Jim.’ She knew he meant it.

  Thank God Jim wasn’t one of those men who thought his wife’s place was firmly in the kitchen. Sylvia didn’t know how her friend Gilly put up with that. Nor Polly, Oxford-educated but treated like a fashion accessory by Alan, who only seemed proud of her if she wore designer clothes and kept herself in full make-up at all times. Each to their own, Sylvia supposed. She was pretty certain her friends were happy with their husbands, but she never would have chosen such a man herself.

  Jim – wonderful Jim – had supported her career ambitions right from those early days working together on the student paper. Of course, back then it was partly because he wanted to get into her knickers. Most of the men she met at Oxford had seemed to want that; not, she knew, because she was any more attractive than anyone else, but simply because men far outnumbered women and they would take whatever they could get. That was surely why, in her first week at St Hilda’s, they’d been subjected to a lecture by the college chaplain about showing restraint.

  She’d wondered at the time if the male freshers had received the same advice.

  But unlike the other boys, Jim hadn’t felt the need to bring her down a peg or two simply because she was a woman with the cheek to show ambition. He’d liked her. He’d liked her writing. And it was both of those facts that eventually enabled him to get into her knickers.

  She recalled lying in his college bed on a Sunday morning, breath visible in the frigid air, plotting their futures in parallel: they’d both move to London, apply for internships, trainee schemes and junior reporter positions, work hard, get promoted. Everything they wanted was in sync until the issue of children came up. So many heated conversations hashed out under the covers, or picnicking in Christ Church Meadow, or drinking in the Eagle and Child, as she gradually brought broody Jim round to her way of thinking. They’d have children, but only when she was ready: when her career was at a suitable point, when they could afford childcare so she could go back to
work. Because she knew, with utter certainty, that if she had a baby too early, her much dreamed about career would diverge from that twin track and go down a different path entirely.

  A flash of colour and a familiar hairstyle brought Sylvia out of her thoughts. She stuck out her hand and grabbed Maggie’s arm, pulling her towards them. ‘There you are!’

  ‘You made it!’ Maggie kissed them both and clapped her hands.

  ‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. You okay? Not too emotional?’ Sylvia could practically see her flatmate’s nervous energy emanating off her. She seemed heightened somehow, as did everything in the room – the laughter shriller than normal, the colours more vivid, the clothes extra glamorous for this special gala performance.

  ‘A bit. But just wait ’til curtain down and I’ll be bawling.’

  ‘I’m sure everyone will. It’s the end of an era.’

  ‘And the start of something,’ Jim said.

  Maggie’s eyes shone, and pride rushed through Sylvia. Years of ushering and studying part time at St Martin’s and it was all about to pay off. One last show here, and then later in the year, Maggie would be starting the job she’d wanted for so long. Her future was finally on track; a messy, creative, fulfilling future surrounded by paint pots and fabric and set designs at that new concrete behemoth on the South Bank.

  The bell rang loud and shrill. ‘I have to go. I’m meant to be in there.’ Maggie jerked her head towards the doors of the auditorium. ‘Enjoy. And don’t wait up – I’m going to the after-show.’

  Sylvia watched her sidle through the throng and then the crowds in the foyer began pushing past her and Jim – terribly sorry, do excuse me – shimmying shoulder to shoulder up the stairs, past the ushers tearing tickets and towards the auditorium.

  Sylvia knocked back her drink, took a last drag on her cigarette and followed the hordes into the darkened theatre. When the house lights went down and Peggy Ashcroft stepped onto the stage, a trickle of sweat rolled down the back of Sylvia’s neck. What had she done? What had she done to her own future?