What with Patrick’s email and my constant anticipation of a message from another Daniel Buchs, I’m in serious need of distraction – thank goodness for Léa’s birthday.
‘You can’t wear that yet!’ I say as Léa skips into the living room in the pale pink dress I helped her pick out on our shopping trip yesterday, along with a pair of sparkly sandals I would have coveted when I was a kid.
‘But I really want to!’
‘You’re going to play in the rope park, it’ll get dirty. Save it for the party later, okay little one?’
‘I’m not little. I’m going to be eight. Huit ans.’
‘You’re right. That is extremely grown up.’
‘Léa! Change ta robe, maintenant!’ Julia comes into the living room in a waft of perfume. She’s wearing a pair of khaki trousers and a white V-necked T-shirt. They’re nothing special but still manage to make her look chic. I remember seeing that T-shirt in her wardrobe. Little does she know. The thought takes me by surprise, and it pleases me.
‘Oh mon Dieu, there’s still so much to do,’ Julia says. Léa flounces away, her long glossy mane swinging behind her. ‘I haven’t put up any decorations for the party. And there are the gifts to wrap. Maria is bringing most of the food, but I wanted to bake a cake and I haven’t had time. What sort of a mother am I?’ She gives brief laugh, perhaps expecting a protestation from me, but I don’t say anything. If Léa were my daughter I’d have made time to make her a cake. And then something occurs to me.
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘I don’t need to go to the rope park with you all. Why don’t I stay here and decorate the house? I can wrap the presents if you show me where they are. Sort out the living room for the party. Maybe I can even rustle up a cake. I mean I’m sure it wouldn’t be as good as yours but… well, I can try.’
Julia lets out a long breath. ‘Really? Jess, that would be super. Are you sure? I know Léa wants you to come with us.’
‘It’s fine. It’s more important that you and Michel are there with her.’
‘Merci, thank you, really. That’s a huge help.’ She puts her hand on my shoulder briefly and I see her gratitude and something else – relief? I smile back, shrug, as though it’s nothing.
When they’ve gone out through the door in a clatter of laughter and shoes on wooden floorboards, I set to work, pleased to be able to do this for Léa, to give her what her mother didn’t have time for. I’ll draw on all my years of classroom cut-out skills to make some brilliant decorations for the party, and then I’ll tackle the cake. I put some music on and help myself to a glass of wine from a bottle Michel opened last night. Then I sit down with a pile of coloured paper that Julia bought but never did anything with, fish out my trusty silver-ink pen I for some reason brought with me from the UK, and get to work. Soon I have a pile of neat multicolour bows that I intend to string together across the room. Seeing them, the weight in my head seems to lift a little. I know Léa’s going to be impressed and I can’t wait to see her face when she realises I did this, not Julia.
I tune the radio to a suitably naff technopop station and sing along tunelessly to whatever comes on as I tackle the serious business of making a cake – a chocolate sponge that I intend to make into something vaguely resembling a hedgehog with the help of a packet of chocolate fingers I found in the cupboard. It’s only afterwards, when the cake’s in the oven and I’ve licked the mixing bowl clean and cleaned up the mess I’ve made that I realise I haven’t looked at my phone for a good hour or so. I wash my hands, pick up the phone and see the email symbol.
My pulse quickens. It’s another Daniel Buchs.
Dear Mrs Faulkner. My hiking club forwarded your message to me. I was very surprised to read your email because I did have a sister called Evelyne who died in 1996 and lived in Lausanne for many years. Can you please tell me why you wanted to find her?
I read the email four or five times before I comprehend what’s in front of me. I’ve found him. Evelyne Buchs’ brother has just emailed me. My hands are shaking. I pour another glass of wine and take a gulp. This could be it. The breakthrough I need. I email back straight away, not wanting to let fear creep in and stop me.
I know it’s a long shot, but I’m actually looking for someone else who was in Lausanne at the same time as your sister and my mother – and, I imagine, you. I was hoping your sister might have known something about her. Her name is Brigitte Mela.
When the oven timer goes off, I take the cake out of the oven and slide it onto a cooling rack. I watch the steam curl into the air, as though there might be answers to be found within it. My head feels full of thoughts that I can’t make sense of, and I’m impatient for Daniel Buchs to reply immediately, to tell me what I need to know.
I can’t sit still, so I pick up my phone and stalk through the flat. I go outside and sit on the terrace, but I can’t settle. I wander back into the living room, then my bedroom. I remove my journal from the bedside table drawer and take out the picture of Mum with Evelyne in 1976 – the one Nina pressed into my hand when I left her – searching it for answers it cannot give. Daniel must have taken the photo, Nina said. That’s right. They arrived on the same night, just before the demonstration. What if Daniel does have the answers? Do I actually want to know, after all?
I put the photo back in my journal and leave my room, intending to head back to the kitchen, but as I reach the door to the master bedroom, I hesitate. I can feel its pull, drawing me in. I put my hand on the door handle, feel the cool metal in my hand. I know I’ll be breaking their trust. Violating their privacy. But I also know I’m not going to stop. There’s something magnetic about this room that compels me towards it.
I push the door open, and there it is, this reflection of their perfect lives. There’s the bed where they made their perfect children. The wardrobe containing Julia’s perfect clothes. The photos on the walls, testament to their perfect, untroubled lives. My life was mostly untroubled, before all this. Not perfect, but pretty good. But over the last few years it’s all disintegrated. Mum’s accident. The tests. The failed IVF. The all-consuming grief that Patrick could only handle for so long before seeking light relief with someone else. So standing in this doorway is like looking into a parallel universe, paraded in front of me like a sick gameshow. Here’s what you could have won…
Inside, I drift around the bed, trailing my hand over the duvet cover. Several framed photos sit atop a chest of drawers. One’s of a younger Léa sitting on a sofa with baby Luca in her arms. Another, slightly grainy, shows two women on a bench by the lake in the sunshine, laughing. They look happy and relaxed, and I wonder who they are. A third is a photograph of Michel and Julia on their wedding day. I pick it up. They’re young, maybe twenty-five or so. Michel wears a grey suit and light pink tie, and his thick hair is gelled back in a way that’s unlike how he wears it now. The self-consciousness of that gel makes me smile. Julia is stunning in a floor-length ivory dress that’s nipped in at the waist and flows out into a wide skirt. She’s wearing a bit too much make-up, but she looks amazing nonetheless.
They look amazing together.
I think of me and Patrick on our wedding day. We certainly didn’t look like that, but we were good together, too. I remember how he looked at me like he couldn’t believe his luck. I remember how happy I felt, that I was finally embarking on this adventure called marriage, emulating my parents in this, even if I’d never had the ambition to emulate the heady heights of their careers. I thought our marriage would last as long as theirs had, that we’d have kids for them to be proud of, but in the end I failed at that, too.
I put the photo back down on the chest of drawers.
Would I have failed so badly if I’d grown up out here instead?
I don’t know what compels me to go from looking to touching, why I can’t stop myself doing something I shouldn’t. It’s like I’m searching for something I can’t name, some clue about Julia’s life that might just provide the answer to mine, the secret to making everythin
g okay again, to achieving what she has. I walk over to Julia’s bedside table and open the top drawer beneath it. It’s crammed with make-up, packets of earplugs, hairbands, lip balms. I pick up her contraceptive pill packet and see she’s taken today’s.
What I am doing?
There’s another packet of prescription medication but it’s all in French and I can’t make out what it is. Sleeping pills?
A sudden sound catches my attention and I drop the packet back in the drawer, heart going double speed. I wait, listening, but there’s nothing, only the radio, still on in the living room, the DJ wittering away in French. It must have been outside.
I close the drawer and open the one beneath. This one is much more organised. I sit on the bed and take out a folder and find Léa and Luca’s birth certificates, and then Michel and Julia’s marriage certificate. Julia Sarah Meier and Michel Jean-Pierre Chevalley, married on 24 July 2003 in Montreux’s hôtel de ville. The town hall. Also in the folder is a bunch of handwritten letters and print-outs of emails, some between Michel and Julia, but they’re all in French. One letter is in German. It’s signed with only a large capital A and two kisses. A woman, clearly. And given the classic, neat script, I wonder if it’s an older relative. It’s dated twelve years ago. I flip it over and see it’s addressed from A. Meier in a place called Thun. I wonder what it says, and why Julia’s kept it so long.
Another song comes on the radio, a Britney Spears track from the late nineties that reminds me of university halls, warm beer and sticky dance floors. I should leave the bedroom, go back and ice the cake, shove in those chocolate fingers. I put the papers back in the folder and the folder in the drawer, and as I turn my head my eyes catch some movement in the mirror on the bedside table and I inhale sharply when I see that in the reflection of the doorway is Jorge.
I’m not sure who is more shocked. Heat rushes to my cheeks.
‘What are you doing?’ he says.
‘I’m, er… I just…’
‘Do Julia and Michel know you’re in here looking through their things?’
I shake my head, mumble a no. Oh God. I feel like one of my own students being told off for nicking another kid’s sandwiches, only I know it’s far, far more serious than that. ‘I came in here to… get something and then I…’ My voice trails off as I can’t even think of a good excuse – because there isn’t one. I don’t deserve to be excused. This isn’t me, I want to say.
He’s looking at me with a mixture of bewilderment and disgust. Perhaps he’s mulling it over, debating whether to tell them or not. I know this is my fault, and yet I can’t stop anger flooding my veins, shouting over the shame. Anger at what my life’s become, at my own inability to deal with it, and at him, standing there where he shouldn’t be and judging me.
‘What the hell are you doing here anyway?’ I say. ‘And don’t you know how to knock?’
He looks taken aback. ‘Mum’s not feeling well. I went to see how she was and she asked me to bring over the food for Léa’s party. I didn’t think anyone would be here so I let myself in with Mum’s key, then I heard the radio was on so I came to see who was here.’ He pauses. ‘Are you stealing something or just being fucking nosy?’
‘I’m—’
He holds a hand up, as though he doesn’t want to hear my excuses. ‘Look, can we just get out of this room?’
He leaves the doorway and I hear him walk down the corridor. I close the drawer I’d been rooting around in and see my wretched face in the mirror. Is this it? I’ve messed up another job already? I feel ugly sobs rising up. Pathetic. I can’t even bear to look at myself.
I take a deep breath and walk down the hall into the kitchen where Jorge is leaning against the kitchen worktop, arms folded over his chest. Trays of food are laid out on the kitchen table – slices of quiche, pastries, cupcakes, fruit salad. He’s turned the radio off and the silence screams at me to say something. My head feels fuzzy and I wish I hadn’t had that second glass of wine.
‘Listen,’ I begin. ‘I’m really sorry I was in there. I shouldn’t have been, I know, and I can see how bad it must look. I don’t even know why I did it. But I wasn’t going to take anything and I didn’t mean any harm.’ All I get in response is a pair of arched eyebrows and a gaze that makes me squirm, and I just know that’s it, he’s going to tell the Chevalleys that I’m a snooping, kid-losing waste of space and I’ll find myself on a break from work for the second time in one year. Panic grips me and I realise I’m just going to have to plead. ‘Please don’t tell them,’ I say. ‘It’s not like me to do that, but I’m just going through some stuff and it’s sending me a bit crazy, but I won’t do it again, I really won’t. I know it was wrong.’
‘Are you drunk?’ he says finally, eyes shifting to the empty bottle of wine on the counter.
‘No.’ I shake my head, although part of me wants to at least have that excuse, to be able to say it was the wine that pushed me to go through Julia’s drawer, to stamp all over her trust.
He doesn’t seem to believe me anyway. ‘I’ll make you a coffee.’
I hesitate. ‘Tea please.’
He rolls his eyes and picks two mugs out of the cupboard, puts the kettle on. ‘You’re lucky to be working for Julia and Michel, you know. They’ve been so good to my parents over the years, they’re like family. I don’t want to see them get hurt, or ripped off, or robbed or… whatever the fuck you might do to them.’ He’s almost shouting.
‘Nothing, I’m not going to do anyth—’
‘So you’re going to sit down and tell me exactly what kind of “stuff” you’re going through and then I’ll decide if I have to tell Julia and Michel or not, okay?’
I nod, gesture towards the kettle, say meekly. ‘Teabag in first, please.’
* * *
I don’t have any intention of telling him the whole story, but as soon as we’re sat on the sofa with mugs in our hands and I open my mouth to speak, that’s what comes out. Perhaps I know that only the truth is serious enough to compensate for my behaviour. Or maybe it’s simply that now Jorge has presented himself as my sounding board I know, suddenly, I desperately need one. I also know he’s going to regret he ever asked.
So I tell him about the coach accident that killed Mum in Turkey in 2012 – a jolly for a women’s magazine that went horrifically wrong thanks to an unroadworthy coach and its overworked driver. I tell him how she bled out during the half hour it took the ambulance to turn up. I tell him about the shock and bewilderment of grief. And about what happened many months later when Dad and I, emerging from the fug of recovery, went to give blood at a mobile donation unit in London, a small, spontaneous gesture in honour of Mum.
It’s strange now, to think back to that day. I remember it so vividly. The London mizzle that fell so lightly but made everything so soggy. Rounding the corner and seeing the van and knowing, without even having to speak the words, that this was something we both wanted to do. At that time we were both still hurting, but it was a pure, uncomplicated hurt: we simply missed her. United in grief, we were swimming slowly through the recovery process, knowing that life was continuing on its path, as it always does, whether you’re ready for it or not. What comforted me was that although our futures had changed fundamentally with the news of that coach crash, we would always have our shared past: our family, the three of us for thirty-five years, that couldn’t be taken away from us. Or so I thought.
The nurse was round and cheerful and bespectacled. She thanked us for donating. We told her why and saw sympathy in her warm face. She gave us chocolate. And then she asked if we knew our blood types.
‘Neither of us did,’ I tell Jorge, ‘so we asked to know, and when we got the results later on it didn’t make sense. The combination of our blood types…’ I shake my head, vaguely aware of Jorge staring at me. ‘It wasn’t possible, you see, that we were related.’
I feel Jorge’s hesitation, his shock. ‘So your mother…’
‘No,’ I almost shout. ‘It wasn
’t that. We knew it wouldn’t be that. Mum wouldn’t. She just wouldn’t have cheated on Dad.’ I swallow back a hard lump of guilt. Because I know, though neither of us ever admitted it out loud, that it had occurred to us both. But only for a moment – at least, for me. ‘I checked Mum’s old medical records, but it didn’t clarify anything. Her blood type could have resulted in mine – from a different father. But I knew it wasn’t that, I just knew.’
I remember the feeling I had, as though memories were rushing forward and taking their place in a big jigsaw puzzle, forming a picture I’d never seen before. Maggie saying, Such lovely blue eyes you have, they must have skipped a generation! Aunt Jemima joking that I couldn’t possibly be her brother’s daughter because I was far too clever and witty. Me, wondering why Rachel looked so like her mother when I didn’t look at all like either of my parents.
‘Dad couldn’t deal with it, didn’t want to know more. But I couldn’t just leave it, I had to know. So I looked up a DNA testing company and ordered a kit. I persuaded Dad to give me a saliva swab, and I took strands of hair from Mum’s old hairbrush. We still hadn’t got rid of her stuff, you see.’ My voice cracks, but I can’t stop now; I have to get it all out. ‘The wait was horrific. I couldn’t sleep. And then, when the letter finally came in the post, I drank half a bottle of gin before I could bear to open it.’
But then I did.
And there it was, typed in stark letters under the clinic’s letterhead. DNA testing for Jessica Faulkner, Jim Millson, Sylvia Tallis. A paragraph of medical speak and percentages and then the final verdict, clear as anything. Conclusion: unrelated. A thread I’d tugged that unravelled my entire identity until I couldn’t see the shape of it anymore. A letter that took away my history, that called our family a lie and left me nothing but a gaping hole where my sense of self should be.
The Other Daughter Page 12
