The Other Daughter

by Caroline Bishop

  JUNE 2016 Montreux, Switzerland

  JESS

  I’m having my doubts already. I’d thought fifteen years of teaching literature to kids who would rather look at their phones than listen to me meant I could handle any child just fine, but of course they’re far harder to control when they’re out of the confines of a classroom.

  ‘Luca!’ Léa runs after her brother, who’s just charged down the ramparts, and I trot after the pair of them.

  ‘Shall we see the dungeons?’ I say. We’ve done the fancy-dress workshop and the face painting. Please let the dungeons entertain them for a while longer.

  ‘What is duggons?’ Léa’s face is smudged with brown streaks the face painters thought depicted a dirty peasant. I wonder what immaculate Julia would think of her daughter looking like this after only one day in my care.

  ‘The place where they keep the bad people.’

  ‘Can we put Luca there?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ I shake my head, though some part of me agrees with the suggestion. He didn’t seem too crazy back at the house under his parents’ gaze. But today he’s manic, running everywhere, whining, crying, chattering non-stop. Maybe he’s testing me, or maybe he’s just excited to be out, away from parents and pre-school and routine.

  His behaviour looks all the worse next to Léa, who’s clearly seven going on twenty-seven. I liked her immensely from the moment she took my hand this morning and announced she was taking me to Montreux town centre to show me around, but could I drive? I said I would, and that we should take Luca too, and she reluctantly agreed in a manner that suggested she had a choice in the matter, but would do me a favour this time.

  It’s chilly beneath the vaulted stone ceiling of Chillon Castle’s underground prison. I read from my guidebook and find the name Byron carved into a pillar, supposedly put there by the poet himself when he visited the castle two hundred years ago. Léa pretends to be interested, nodding solemnly as I read. Luca’s momentarily cowed into silence by the imposing room, until his sister whispers something to him and then he’s crying. I don’t need to speak French to know she’s threatening to leave him here. It’s clear we’re all castled out.

  We walk back over the drawbridge and wander down the lakeshore a little way to sit on the wall and eat our picnic. Cheese and gherkin sandwiches, apples, and a fizzy drink called Rivella that Léa says is her favourite. The castle sticks out into the lake next to us. Whichever medieval bigwig built it certainly knew how to pick a spot: in front of us, the lake is flat calm, and the mountains on the other side meld shade upon shade like some perfect watercolour painting. I understand now why ladies in the nineteenth century came to Switzerland to cure their ailments. Not because of anything miraculous in the water – though it does look clean enough to drink – but because of this: the heady fragrance of the flowers decorating the promenade’s verges, the ducks bobbing on the tranquil lake, the solid bulk of the Alps a constant, comforting backdrop. It’s like I’ve stepped out of reality and into a picture book by a Swiss Enid Blyton. It’s summer, I have Michel’s credit card, Julia’s car and free reign to explore, my only task being to gently impart some of my own language onto two already semi-bilingual children.

  It’s just what I need right now. My cure.

  If only that’s all it was.

  Fear swells in my chest and I fix my eyes on the reflections in the water until it dissipates. It’s only my first day on the job and yet I’m already thinking about what’s ahead, about what I might find out if I let myself. I exhale a long, shaky breath. I don’t need to do anything straight away. I don’t need to do anything about it at all, if that’s what I want. It’s entirely possible that, when it comes down to it, I simply won’t have the guts.

  ‘Where do you live?’ Léa says. She’s finished her sandwich and is munching on a packet of paprika crisps.

  ‘London. The capital of England.’

  ‘Where the Queen lives?’

  ‘Yes. Well, it’s a big city, but yes.’ I wonder if the Queen has ever been to Peckham.

  ‘It is nice?’

  I nod. ‘It’s busy. Exciting. Wonderful.’ How else to describe the city that’s been so much a part of my life to a seven-year-old Swiss who has never been?

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  ‘You have children?’

  I shake my head. It’s not a loaded question coming from her, so I don’t mind. Unlike the countless people who have asked me that, or a version of that, in recent years. A harmless enough question on the face of it, but one that’s usually dripping with subtext: Why not? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you want them?

  Sometimes I’m tempted just to tell them the truth. Yes, I want to say. I want children so much it’s like a physical pain, but after five years of trying and several failed rounds of IVF, my husband and I have separated, so my chances are slim, don’t you think?

  But it’s against social etiquette to say things like that, to make people feel awkward even though they were the one probing for gossip, so I just smile and brush it off. Oh you know, perhaps one day…

  ‘You have a husband?’ Léa asks.

  ‘Nope.’ An easier response than ‘sort of’.

  ‘Why?’

  I look out into the lake. There’s a question. ‘Because life doesn’t always turn out the way you want it to,’ I say.

  Léa continues eating her crisps and I think she’s got bored of questioning me. She kicks her feet against the wall. ‘Maman says you can do whatever you want if you work hard,’ she says after a minute, and I’m impressed by her sentence structure.

  I finish my Rivella and look at her. ‘If I had a daughter, I would say exactly the same to her.’ Even if it’s not true.

  A wail turns both our heads to Luca. He’s dropped his sandwich in the lake. A duck makes a beeline and starts pecking at it. A gherkin slice detaches and bobs about on the surface.

  ‘Arrête, arrête!’ Léa shouts, fingers in her ears, but Luca cries even harder.

  I get off the wall and go to comfort Luca with the remaining bit of my own sandwich, but he continues to look at the duck and cry.

  ‘Life doesn’t always do the way you want,’ Léa says to her brother with a glint in her eye, and I raise my eyebrows, pleased but also perturbed that I’ve taught her such a phrase.

  ‘Turn out the way you want.’ She may as well get it right.

  I pick Luca off the wall. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

  * * *

  I let us into the house and Léa runs to the living room and throws open the terrace door. ‘Salut, Maria!’ she yells as she dashes past the kitchen.

  Maria calls something after them in French and I pick out the word glace. I hear ‘Oui!’ from the garden and the sound of splashing water. They’re already in the paddling pool.

  ‘S’il te plaît!’ Maria calls back, her pleading for politeness falling on deaf ears. She pulls a tub of chocolate ice cream out of the freezer and gestures towards me. ‘You want?’

  ‘No, thank you. Merci,’ I say. Given Maria is from Spain, maybe I should have said gracias. Not that I’d get any further in Spanish than in French, so I’m forced to demonstrate that fact by conversing in English to a Spaniard who has never visited England and yet still manages to speak my language far, far better than I could ever speak hers. If I’d grown up here, I could be like Julia and Michel, speaking two or three languages as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Instead I grew up in a country that doesn’t promote language learning and expects the rest of the world to compensate for that. Out here, I’m quickly realising just how embarrassing that is.

  I deliver ice cream to the kids, making a mental note to clean up the inevitable mess before Julia gets home, then I return to the kitchen where Maria is chopping vegetables for the evening meal. I offer to help but she won’t hear of it. I’m the teacher and nanny, she’s the cleaner and occasional cook, and our roles don’t overlap. I can just hear Patric
k taking the piss out of this whole set-up, and me, for being part of it. The thought makes me smile and I long to pick up the phone and tell him about it, though I know I shouldn’t. Despite what he did, he’s still the person I want to tell everything to.

  Maria finishes chopping and washes her hands, wiping them on the apron pulled taut over her ample belly. She’s short and round and all soft edges, reminding me of Erika. I only vaguely remember what my nanny looked like but I do recall her essence – the rounded wholesomeness of her, her scent of home cooking and perfume, her exotic foreignness. Was she Danish? I can’t remember. But I know I adored her, that I only tolerated seeing her leave at the end of the day because it meant I got my parents back for a few short hours before another day started.

  ‘What are you cooking?’

  ‘A tagine, with chicken,’ Maria says.

  ‘Do you always cook for them?’

  She shrugs. ‘No. Only sometimes. They busy people. Work and work. Julia ask me to prepare dinner if she know they not home until late.’

  There are more than two million foreigners in Switzerland, I read on my phone last night whilst lying in the double bed of the guest room between cotton sheets with a thread count that would make my bank balance weep. That’s a quarter of the whole population. I wonder how it feels to make a life in a country that’s not your own; to arrive for a job and then stay for a lifetime. Do you always feel as foreign as I do now?

  ‘Why did you come here, Maria, if you don’t mind my asking?’ I pinch a carrot from the chopping board.

  Maria smiles. ‘Is better here. I make more money. There was no work for us in Toledo, and a friend who live here offered Filipe a job.’

  ‘Filipe is your husband?’

  She nods. ‘He is concierge for two apartment blocks in Montreux.’ She gets a tin of tomatoes out of the cupboard and selects two small jars from the rack above the hob. The heady spice of paprika catches in my throat as she shakes it into the hot pan. ‘And you? Why you come to be teacher here?’

  ‘I’ve taught in England for years,’ I say. I bite into the carrot, forcing nonchalance. ‘But I just wanted a change.’

  Maria raises her eyebrows. ‘But this is only for the summer. What happens after?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ I think of John Peacock calling me into his office, the humiliation of standing in front of the headmaster and being unable to stop the tears running down my face, his visible awkwardness as he addressed the concerns of my colleagues over my mental well-being, and the complaint of a student – Sally Brightman, daughter of a governor, of course – after that awful incident when I’d nearly slapped her in front of the whole class. I never would have done it, I’d told myself afterwards, but I knew it was too close for comfort. I never used to let them rile me like that. But then lots of things in my life weren’t as they used to be, and it seemed Patrick’s actions had finally broken something in me.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to pry into your personal life, but it’s clear you’re going through a tough time, and I don’t like to see my staff burn out,’ Peacock had said. ‘It’s nearly exam season, term’s just about over. Would it be useful for you to have a sabbatical next year? Have a breather, sort things out? You can start right now; I can find cover for your final classes this term. I’ll hold your job open for a year. You’re a long-serving member of staff and we don’t want to lose you. What do you say?’

  I knew it wasn’t really a question.

  Maggie picked me up a week later and took me back to her place in Bath. I’d called her first because I knew she was the most able to pick up the pieces of my broken life and attempt to put me back together again. My fairy godmother. If only she could wave a wand and make everything all right. I can picture her now, probably pottering about the garden, pruning flowers, forgetting next to which bush she’d left the cup of Earl Grey she made herself half an hour ago, her mind already on her next theatre job. The cat will be stalking birds in the flowerbeds, or, if it’s too hot and he can’t be bothered, he’ll be flaked out on the cool soil, a slight movement in his tail his only response should Maggie call his name.

  The thought comforts me. A familiar scene, carried out repeatedly for years, unchanged by whatever else is happening in the world. The Middle East in turmoil, Europe voting in populist leaders, my life turned on its head… but Maggie will still be deadheading the dahlias. That’s why I went to her after Peacock shepherded me away from the school, and not to Dad, caught up in his own web of denial and grief, who refused to talk to me about everything that had happened to our family.

  Maggie’s constancy, her intrinsic optimism, her quiet support was what I needed. But her pragmatic side wouldn’t let me wallow for long.

  ‘It’s been long enough and this can’t go on, it’s destroying you,’ she said. ‘Go and find out what you need to know.’

  She’d got on the internet one evening, searched for teaching jobs in Switzerland, and by the time I’d cooked us dinner she’d found me three to apply for. She’d tucked into the lasagne and looked at me. ‘Well?’

  Could I go? I didn’t know, but I knew I had to do something. A huge question mark had hung over me for nearly two years, infecting every aspect of my life, destroying my marriage and damaging my career, until there I was, licking my wounds at Maggie’s – and I wouldn’t find the answers I needed there. But then there was Dad, my kind, loving father, who’d begged me to leave it be, and I couldn’t bear to hurt him any more than he had been already.

  ‘He doesn’t want me to do this. He thinks I’m… I don’t know, overreacting or something.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. He’s simply pretending it hasn’t happened because he doesn’t know how to deal with it,’ Maggie said. ‘He’ll be okay. I’ll talk to him.’

  ‘And Mum?’ I’d asked more quietly. That was at the heart of it. Would she have wanted me to go there, to try and find out what happened?

  ‘Darling girl, what about you?’ Maggie had said. ‘If you’re going to sort yourself out, you need to deal with what’s churning around in your head. And I think your mum would want you to do whatever it took to be okay again.’

  Tears pricked the back of my eyes. ‘You think so?’

  ‘She just wanted you to be happy, darling – and so does your dad, even though he’s not very good at saying so out loud.’ She smiled, her face creasing into the crow’s feet begot from years of laughter and joyful times, many of them with her best friend, whom I knew she missed almost as much as I did.

  * * *

  Julia and Michel arrive together at around eight o’clock. Maria’s gone. The kids are dry and sitting in front of an animation in English that I’d loaded onto my iPad back home, the paddling pool now free of chocolate ice cream. I’m sitting on the terrace reading my guidebook.

  I look up when the door opens and nerves flicker in my chest. It’s weird being employed in a household. Like I have to wear my work face at all times. No sitting in your pyjamas picking your cuticles in front of the telly. No reading all evening and ignoring the people you live with. Patrick hated both of those habits.

  Michel peers into the oven at the tagine that’s been cooking for a good couple of hours now. ‘That smells so good! Bonsoir, Jess. All okay?’

  I nod and close my book. Julia greets me and then goes over to the kids, but they barely look up from Frozen. She rolls her eyes. ‘You finish this and then no more.’

  Léa nods without taking her eyes off the screen.

  ‘Sorry, should I not…?’ I say.

  Julia waggles her head and makes a little pouty gesture with her mouth. ‘It’s okay. I don’t normally let them watch much television, but I’ll make an exception for English programmes. Part of their learning.’ She gives me a tight smile. ‘Anyway, tell me what you’ve done today.’

  I recount our trip to the castle, the face painting and Byron and the picnic by the lake.

  ‘Excellent. And what have you learned today?’ Julia says to the kids.

  �
�Duck!’

  ‘Dungeons.’

  Julia laughs. ‘It’s a start.’ She slips into a chair and lets out a little sigh. She looks tired; there’s a tinge of red rimming her big brown eyes, and strands of her glossy hair have slipped out of the neat chignon she put it in that morning. For some reason it pleases me to know she doesn’t sail through her working day untouched.

  ‘Long day?’ I say.

  ‘Always.’ She slips into a chair. ‘We have this big event on in a couple of months and there’s so much to do.’

  I did ask her what she does but, as with most jobs that aren’t the kind that pop up on a school careers advice questionnaire, I haven’t really understood it exactly. Something to do with sport and sponsorship and event planning. One of those jobs that, when you’re a kid and you’re considering what on earth you might do with your life, it never occurs to you to choose because you’ve never heard of it. It’s always fascinated me, as someone who made an unimaginative career choice, how people end up in such obscure professions.

  ‘But you don’t have to do all of it yourself.’ Michel sits down next to her. ‘She does far more for her boss than she should,’ he says to me and Julia shakes her head.

  ‘It’s my job.’

  He puts his hand on hers and gives it a gentle shake. ‘Yes, but you let yourself get taken advantage of sometimes.’

  Julia smiles and rolls her eyes at me. ‘He thinks he knows everything.’

  But despite their gentle chiding of each other, I can see the affection between them and I feel a hard knot in my throat at the sheer perfection of this whole family. The stable, mutually supportive marriage, the two beautiful children, the successful careers, the lovely home… I was meant to have this by now. But instead it’s like a hand came out of nowhere and slapped my life off its axis. I ache to go back to before. I want the comfort of marriage, the certainty of my parents’ love, the stability of St Mary’s, the prospect of a family of my own. But I don’t have any of that now.