The Other Daughter

by Caroline Bishop

  We’re all quiet in the car on the way home. Léa’s fallen asleep, Michel is silent and I gaze out of the window as we cross the long, high motorway bridge back to Montreux. When we get to the house, Michel carries Luca in first and I hear a gasp from Julia.

  I’m surprised she’s actually home from work.

  There’s a fraught exchange in French and then she takes Luca from Michel and goes over to the sofa. Michel sits beside them and Léa follows, squeezing herself against Julia, who puts an arm around both children and hugs them tight. I remain in the doorway and swallow down a hard lump of envy in my throat.

  She has everything I want.

  MARCH 1976 London, UK

  SYLVIA

  The bar was already heaving when they arrived. Sylvia was sure many of the regulars had been there all afternoon. She wondered how they ever got any work done. But on the other hand, she knew that a stint in El Vino’s or one of the other hack hangouts was a necessity. Over claret and cigars, journalists were creating firm friendships that would likely pay dividends later in their careers, keeping their ears to the ground for an opening on another paper, schmoozing with their seniors in the hope of gaining a regular column or a pay rise, and gossiping over the latest news in and out of Fleet Street: at the moment, it was the breakdown of Princess Margaret’s marriage and Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s shock resignation. Though she disliked the bar’s owner for his ridiculous attitude towards women and supported those who were suing him over it, she begrudgingly went there anyway because to boycott it was only to shoot yourself in the foot. Pick your battles, she’d decided.

  She inched her way through the sea of shirts, jackets and ties towards the tables in the back room where the owner deigned to allow women to sit. Marnie was already there with Janice and a couple of other women she didn’t know.

  ‘What can I get yer, love?’ A waiter was clearing glasses as she sat down.

  ‘A dry white wine, please,’ she said, hating her own complicity. What bloody use was the new Sex Discrimination Act if she couldn’t just go and order her drink at the bar like the men?

  ‘I hear he’s paying her ten thousand a year.’ Marnie leant back in her seat and took a long drag on her cigarette.

  ‘And a fair bit else besides – usually late at night bent over his desk,’ Janice said, and the others laughed.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ Sylvia asked. She slipped off her coat and lit a cigarette proffered by Marnie, whose cleavage heaved as she leaned forward. As usual, the fashion editor’s eye-catching outfit made the most of her natural assets – her patterned wrap dress cut a deep V over her ample bosom, which seemed on the brink of spilling out altogether. Though Sylvia thought it crazy to wear clothes like that to work, she sort of admired her devil-may-care attitude in the face of the men’s regular jibes. Marnie didn’t even seem to mind they’d nicknamed her ‘bouncy castle’. Of course, it had occurred to Sylvia that flaunting what she had gave her colleague certain advantages.

  ‘Jean Yardley-Jones,’ Marnie said. ‘Columnist at the Mirror. Rumour has it she’s going to take over from Elizabeth Franks at the Express next month.’

  ‘Oh right. I’ve read her stuff, she’s a good writer.’

  ‘And good at blow jobs, apparently.’ Janice cackled and the others joined in. Sylvia was weary of rumours like these, but she knew there was likely to be truth in it. She remembered Janice hinting as much about Valerie and Roger. An open secret – to all except their spouses, apparently. Was that why Valerie basically had free rein to interview whomever she liked?

  ‘Valerie’s furious because it wasn’t offered to her.’ Marnie lowered her voice and added with a smirk, ‘Doesn’t realise it’s only Roger who thinks the sun shines out of her arse.’

  With a glance to her right, Marnie got up, heading for the ladies, and to Sylvia’s surprise Valerie sidled through the throng and sat down next to her, a glass of sherry in her hand.

  ‘Shouldn’t it be champagne?’ Valerie nodded towards Sylvia’s glass. ‘I hear you’ve done rather well.’

  Sylvia cocked her head. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your piece on women’s lib in Switzerland. Sam had less of a workout than he was expecting. I didn’t hear him swear once.’

  ‘He’s subbed it?’

  Valerie blew out smoke above Sylvia’s head. ‘Said it wasn’t bad at all. Though of course you knew it was good, didn’t you?’

  Sylvia couldn’t suppress a smile. She’d worked bloody hard on the feature, and yes, she knew it was good, but she’d still felt concerned that somehow it wouldn’t make it past Roger’s critical eye or sub-editor Sam’s ruthless pencil. ‘When’s it going in, do you know?’

  ‘Friday, I believe.’

  Valerie’s face was unreadable, as ever, and her lack of expression – bar a touch of something (amusement?) in her pale blue eyes – made Sylvia feel uneasy, as though there was a whirl of thoughts and judgements going on in the columnist’s head that she, the underling, wasn’t privy to. It made her respond in kind; to anyone else she’d admit she was ecstatic to hear her feature was subbed and approved by Roger and going to be published, but to Valerie she felt forced to adopt a disinterested, almost haughty air.

  It was strange, feeling unable to talk with any frankness to Valerie, given she knew so much intimate detail about her life – or, at least, the version of her life she portrayed in her column. She knew Valerie thought she was dying when she started her periods at fourteen because her mother had never spoken about this rite of passage. She knew Valerie had one lover before marrying her husband and stopped herself getting pregnant with him in that pre-pill era by religiously counting days and feigning a headache on the most fertile ones. She knew Valerie had helped a friend leave her violent husband, and that she’d suffered from depression after the birth of her second child. She knew all this, yet she had never really had a conversation with the columnist that went beyond superficial chitchat. But today of all days she needed to know something – and boosted by Valerie’s words about her feature, she felt she could summon the balls to ask.

  ‘Valerie, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, a smile on her mouth that didn’t reach her eyes.

  ‘How have you managed it? Being such a successful journalist whilst bringing up two children?’

  Valerie drained her glass and looked at her. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I insisted they pay me exceedingly well so I can employ a live-in nanny.’

  ‘It’s that simple?’

  Valerie laughed. ‘Darling, it’s never simple. You know that already, or you wouldn’t have made it to Fleet Street in the first place.’ She leaned forward. ‘You want my advice? Don’t do it. Or at least, don’t do it until you’re a star writer with the freedom to do as you please and a pay packet that gives you considerably more clout than you have now. And believe you me, that’s not as easy as I’ve made it look.’ She paused, cocked her head. ‘Max Harmer started the same time as you, yes?’

  Sylvia nodded. ‘Same week.’

  ‘Well you must know he’s on significantly more than you, and only for the mere fact of owning a pair of bollocks. So much for the Equal Pay Act.’ Valerie stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, smoke spiralling into Sylvia’s face. ‘And even if you do manage to convince an editor to dip into his deep pockets, if you’re at all serious about your career you won’t want to step back from it, not even for a minute. No editor will reward you for buggering off to have a baby. And no ambitious young hack wants to miss out on a story because she has to tuck her kids into bed.’ She narrowed her eyes, nodded to Sylvia’s engagement ring. ‘You’re contemplating it?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Sylvia said. She waved her hand in the air, as though the ring was nothing. ‘We don’t intend to have children just yet. My fiancé is entirely supportive of my career.’

  Valerie nodded. ‘Jim Millson, isn’t it?’

  Sylvia’s surprise must have shown on her face because Valerie added, ‘Oh
I know most things about most people round here.’ She drained her glass and put it down on the table. ‘Supportive,’ she repeated.

  ‘Very. We’ve always wanted the same thing, and he sees no reason why I shouldn’t aim high.’

  Valerie raised her eyebrows. ‘Well jolly good. Just make sure you don’t do better than him, or it’s curtains for your marriage. But then, you’re a woman, and this is Fleet Street, so frankly the odds are stacked against you anyway. Oh!’ She grabbed a passing arm. ‘David darling – order me another sherry, there’s a dear.’ And with that she got up and left the table without a backwards glance.

  * * *

  Greenham looked at her over his glasses with a pointed expression of disapproval, but all Sylvia could focus on were his bushy eyebrows, alarmingly thick and black, which waggled when he talked. She felt an inappropriate desire to laugh. He questioned her at length, kept repeating the word distress. Was the pregnancy really causing her mental distress? Did she feel too distressed to carry on? Had she thought of the distress that a termination would cause her?

  Yes, she said. Yes, yes. But the thought of continuing the pregnancy was far worse. It lay heavy on her windpipe, twisted her intestines and throbbed in her head.

  ‘It’s not uncommon to have doubts about becoming a mother.’ He attempted a coercive smile.

  ‘I don’t have doubts. I’m certain I don’t want to be,’ she said. She saw Jim’s face again. How delighted he’d be.

  He never has to know.

  Greenham sighed. ‘You’re not a teenager. You’re a young woman soon to be married. There’s no physical reason why you shouldn’t have this baby, and I find it very dubious that a bright young woman such as yourself would find this sufficiently distressing to warrant a termination.’

  She wondered what he knew about sufficiently distressing. The photo on his desk showed a couple in their twenties holding a small baby. Perhaps his son or daughter and grandchild. The woman was smiling in delight at the tiny face peering up at her. The loving husband had a beatific gaze: the lion with his pride.

  A picture of the perfect family, right there.

  But she knew it was never as simple as that. The picture didn’t show the sacrifices the woman had made: the physical difficulties of having a baby – difficulties that her sister, Susie, had delighted in telling her in intimate detail – or the personal and professional desires that got shoved under the bed. It didn’t show the endless days of nappies and bottles and puke until her loving husband came home and she could finally get some sleep – if she wasn’t cooking him dinner or doing the washing.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Maggie had said. Jim was a modern man. He could cook, change nappies, do a bottle. It was ’76, not ’56.

  But, she realised, she didn’t want to do any of that either. She simply didn’t. And it occurred to her then that perhaps she actually didn’t want children at all – not just now, but ever. Despite her career ambitions, despite her seemingly insatiable desire to see what the world could offer, she’d never entertained the possibility she could choose not to have children. She’d always assumed she would one day because that’s what you did, because that’s what society expected, because that’s what Jim wanted, her parents wanted, because it was what so many of her friends were doing. But perhaps she simply didn’t want them at all.

  It surprised her to realise this, and with the realisation came relief.

  ‘If you won’t say yes then I’ll find another doctor who will,’ she said.

  He sighed and signed the form.

  * * *

  It smelt cloying in the clinic, a mixture of air freshener and disinfectant. She gave her name to the receptionist, who directed her to the waiting room where she sat on one of the hard, plastic chairs around the edge, trying not to make eye contact with the three other women in the room. As though they’d made a collective agreement, all three were staring, eyes glazed, at a low table in the centre of the room that was covered with magazines. Good Housekeeping, Woman & Home, Woman’s Realm. A vase of perky daffodils sat in the centre. Spring flowers. If she had the baby, it would be born when – October? The thought pushed its way into her head before she could stop it. Seeking a distraction, she reached forward and picked up a magazine.

  Hearty meals he’ll love you for! How returning to work will affect your marriage. Fabulous fashions to sew from sheets. Poll: home or career, can you have both?

  She dropped it back on the table. Gilly had a subscription to Good Housekeeping. Perhaps she made clothes from sheets and hearty meals her husband loved. Her school friend was happy with her life, Sylvia knew that, and she admired her ability to be content with her lot. But she couldn’t understand it. Humans had stood on the moon, a woman was the leader of the opposition, Ziggy Stardust and Blondie and John and Yoko were making new rules – and then breaking them again. Why choose a regular life when you could choose an exciting one?

  ‘Mrs Tallis?’

  She looked up. A nurse was standing in the doorway to the waiting room. She didn’t smile.

  ‘Ms,’ she said, and the other women in the room looked up when she spoke. One of them could only have been eighteen. Her face was pale, her eyes bloodshot.

  Sylvia stood up and walked towards the nurse, her stomach doing backflips.

  ‘Come this way, please.’

  The nurse led Sylvia into a private room with a hospital bed, a small wash basin and a table on wheels loaded with various medical equipment. A doctor appeared – Dr Bennett, he said – and asked her the same questions Greenham had. Why couldn’t she have the baby? Was she completely sure? Did she want counselling? By the end of his interrogation her brain was spinning and she felt close to tears. Apparently convinced, Bennett handed her a clipboard, a pen and a form. She took the paperwork and sat back on the bed as he left the room.

  Boxes to complete. Consent to sign. A life to abort.

  She took a deep breath. She couldn’t believe she was actually in the position of having to do this. She remembered a girl in her year at school who fell pregnant at sixteen. At least, that was the rumour when she left school so suddenly in the middle of term. The child must be around eight by now. What pity she’d felt towards the girl. And how determined – and arrogant, she admitted now – she’d been that it wouldn’t happen to herself.

  ‘Have you filled in the forms?’ The nurse was back.

  ‘Yes.’ She handed the clipboard over and the nurse put it aside. Sylvia sat in silence as the nurse took her blood pressure, and winced as a needle went into her vein to draw blood.

  ‘I want you to know you can change your mind at any time up until you take the first medication.’ The nurse stared at her, unsmiling. Sylvia nodded again, thought how happy her mother would be to become a grandmother again. A baby niece or nephew for her sister’s brood.

  ‘I’m sure,’ she mumbled. She wondered if it would be a serious, thoughtful child, like she’d been, or happy-go-lucky, like Jim.

  ‘You’ll need to come back for a second appointment tomorrow,’ the nurse was saying but her words had gone fuzzy, as though she was hearing them under water. She felt dizzy, nauseous. She could do this. She had every right to do this. She could erase this accidental conception and carry on down the path she intended. That’s what she should do. But sitting there on the crisp white sheets of the clinic, she understood with a flash of clarity that for reasons unfathomable to her right then and there, she wasn’t going to.

  PART TWO

  ‘In prehistoric times cave-women needed cave-men with their superior muscles to move large stones, kill hairy beasts and carry heavy loads. But nowadays with the help of modern electronics a dainty manicured finger could launch a space-craft. It’s still nice to have a man in the kitchen to open a pickle jar now and again, but it isn’t an absolute necessity.’

  From the book Making Friends with the Opposite Sex by Californian scientist Mrs Emily Coleman (Cressrelles, 1974), quoted in an article in the Liverpool Echo, 1976<
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  APRIL 1976 London, UK

  SYLVIA

  It had felt natural to say yes to Jim when he’d asked her to marry him one warm summer’s afternoon on a picnic blanket overlooking the Brittany coast. It was at the end of a three-week road trip around France following her year in Paris. They’d come out of the year apart unscathed; they were still together, still in love, so when he asked her – quite unexpectedly to Sylvia’s mind – it felt natural to say yes. And that was it, they were engaged. But she never thought they’d end up tying the knot quite in this way.

  ‘Don’t fuss,’ she said when Jim called her at the office, as he’d taken to doing daily.

  ‘I’m not fussing, I’m just checking in.’ She could hear the smile in his voice. He’d been smiling ever since she told him she was pregnant. She swore he looked taller, walked with a bounce in his stride. It was endearing and horrifying at the same time.

  ‘You don’t need to call me here. I’ve told you I feel perfectly fine.’ She lowered her voice and turned around in her chair to face away from Max. She didn’t intend to tell anyone at work about her situation just yet. Not until she had to. She needed time for it to sink in herself, to make sense of the decision she’d made at the clinic. It had been so sudden and yet so definite. An almost physical urge not to abort. As though the baby itself had prevented her from going through with it. And then she told Jim and suddenly it was completely out of her hands. Her mother’s wavering voice down the phone, delighted and disapproving at the same time. What will the neighbours think? Her sister Susie, already planning to drive over with a drawer-load of cast-offs. And Jim, taking her hands and saying with glee, We’d better just do it then, let’s get married as soon as we can. And then there was a registry office and a pub in Wandsworth booked for two weeks’ time, so everyone could pretend it didn’t happen in the wrong order and Sylvia could become a respectable married pregnant woman, just like they all wanted.