The Other Daughter

by Caroline Bishop

  ‘I came here in part to see if I could find my biological parents,’ I say. ‘They were most likely Swiss, or at least the woman was. Mum – the person I’ve always known as my mother – gave birth prematurely at the hospital in Lausanne when she was over here for a story, and somehow I must have been swapped with her baby. That’s the only explanation we could think of, anyway. I contacted the hospital and they’ve investigated, but they don’t know how it happened. Only three other women gave birth to girls that night. Two they tracked down and tested. But the third woman they just couldn’t find. She’d disappeared. No paper trail.’ I shake my head and stare into my cooling cup of tea.

  Brigitte Mela. The only likely candidate to be my biological mother.

  ‘It’s taken me two years to pluck up the courage, but I felt I had to come here to see if I could uncover anything myself. Maybe I can find her.’ Perhaps my biological father too; maybe even the other daughter – the woman who’s been living the life that should have been mine. Though I’m not sure if I actually want to know who that is.

  I take a breath and look at Jorge, but when I see the stricken expression in his eyes, my face prickles with embarrassment. I shouldn’t have told him. Shit, I really shouldn’t have told him. I don’t even know this man.

  He runs his fingers through his hair and lets out a long, tense breath as though he’s been holding it in the whole time I was speaking. ‘Joder,’ he says, and I can guess from the tone of his voice what that particular Spanish word must mean. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’

  I put my mug on the coffee table and my head in my hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  I look up and he’s staring at me with incredulity. ‘It’s completely insane, Jess. I’m just… I mean…’ I almost want to laugh, he looks so shocked. ‘When you said you were going through something, I thought maybe… I don’t know, a break-up or something.’

  ‘Well, now you mention it, my husband and I are getting divorced.’

  ‘Joder,’ he says again.

  I take his mug from his hand and add it to mine on the table. ‘I realise my head’s not in a good place right now,’ I say, my voice soft, ‘but I really want this job and I think those kids are fantastic and I promise I’m not going to do anything to hurt them – or their parents. I really am sorry.’

  ‘Have you had help with this? I mean, therapy or something?’

  I shake my head. ‘I think this is my therapy, being here in Switzerland. I need to find out the truth. I think that’s the only thing that’s going to help.’

  He looks at me and his eyes make me shrivel. ‘You won’t find the truth in Julia’s drawers.’

  ‘I know.’ My cheeks burn and I hang my head. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  He sighs, nods, seemingly convinced. ‘I won’t say anything. But if you mess up one more—’

  ‘I won’t,’ I interrupt him. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. No more snooping, I promise. And I’m going to watch Luca like a hawk.’

  He gets up from the sofa and stands in front of me, his hands on his hips. ‘I have to go. I’m late for something. But look, Jess, I’m concerned about your state of mind with all this to deal with.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’

  He walks over to the kitchen and scribbles something on a bit of paper and comes back and hands it to me. ‘My number. If you ever feel like you’re going to throw yourself off a mountain or something, call me first, okay?’

  When he leaves, I sit on the sofa, waiting for my pulse to slow. I feel winded, the breath knocked out of me by all I’ve said, all that’s taken place in the last few years. I don’t know how long I sit there in the silence, and so I’m startled when my phone throws out a short, sharp message alert, drawing me out of my thoughts. I pick it up and my heart jumps to see that it’s Daniel Buchs.

  It’s brief, terse almost. Quite unlike his previous email.

  May I ask why you want to find Brigitte Mela?

  I drop the phone like it’s scalded me. He knows her. He knows my birth mother.

  MAY 1976 London, UK

  SYLVIA

  They got the keys for the new flat in Kennington on a Wednesday evening after work. A two-bed garden flat in a Victorian terrace. It felt to Sylvia like a grown-up person’s home, a family home, far from the scruffy place she’d shared with Maggie for the past two years. It had a large double and a smaller room that was perfect as a nursery. A kitchen diner with plenty of space, a sitting room with a fireplace, original features, a patio. When Jim put his arm around her, smiled at the estate agent – ‘this is the one’ – she’d suppressed an urge to turn around and run out the door.

  ‘If you only do things when you’re ready, you’ll never do anything at all,’ Maggie chastised her the following weekend. They were putting an end to their time as flatmates with a takeaway from their new favourite restaurant, the curry house at London Bridge. ‘I mean, do you think most people in Britain are ready to experience the flavour sensation of an onion bhaji? No, I think not. But once they try it, they’ll bloody love it.’ She held one up. ‘This, my dear, is the future.’

  ‘Did you really just compare my newly married life to an onion bhaji?’ Sylvia burst into laughter, and then tears started running down her cheeks. Maybe it was just the heat of the spices. ‘I’m going to miss you, Mags.’

  ‘It’s not like you’ll never see me, silly.’ Maggie bit into the bhaji. ‘But I can’t believe you’re making me get a new flatmate. It’s going to feel strange to have another girl rattling around.’

  ‘She’d better like Columbo.’

  ‘That’s one of my interview questions.’ Maggie picked up her beer with a paint-speckled hand and Sylvia felt a pang of sadness. No longer would she find flecks of pink and white and green on her socks at the end of each day, the detritus of Maggie’s absent-minded habit of picking dried paint from her clothes, her hair, her skin, something that had always driven Sylvia crazy but now only made her want to cry.

  ‘Oh, I got you a present.’ Maggie put down her beer and left the room, returning a minute later with a wrapped package, clearly a book.

  Sylvia tore off the wrapping paper and laughed when she saw the title. Superwoman by Shirley Conran. ‘How to save time and money,’ she read the front cover. ‘How to be a working wife and mother.’

  ‘I thought you might need it.’

  She knew Shirley Conran by reputation, of course, as the former women’s editor of the Daily Mail. And she knew this book spent weeks and weeks on the bestseller lists after it was published last year. But she’d never got around to reading it. It didn’t apply to her, she’d thought. She had no house to keep, no children to look after. She was unmarried and unencumbered. She didn’t need a how-to guide about housekeeping.

  ‘It’s about shortcuts; you know, like avoiding buying clothes that need ironing.’

  ‘Right,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘Listen.’ Maggie took it from her and opened it to the first page. ‘The purpose of this book is to help you do the work you don’t like as fast as possible, leaving time for the work you enjoy,’ she read.

  Maggie looked up and her face was so full of hope and optimism that Sylvia felt a lump rise in her throat. Maggie, lovely Maggie, she cared so much.

  ‘Oh Syl, I’m sorry. I thought you’d like it. It’s not about being just a housewife, it’s about how you can have everything. You can work and have a child and be successful at both. Because I know you’re going to be. All you need, according to this,’ she said, flicking to a page in the middle of the book that she’d clearly read before, ‘is a fast and unerring sense of priority’.

  Sylvia picked up a bhaji. ‘I just didn’t think I’d be here yet.’ She took a bite and felt the heat of the spices warm her face, prickle her eyes until she felt them fill.

  Maggie put a hand on hers. ‘Everything comes to an end. But that doesn’t mean the next new thing won’t be just as exciting. It’ll be different, that’s all
.’

  She nodded, even though she wasn’t sure she agreed. ‘Onwards then.’

  Maggie squeezed Sylvia’s hand. ‘And upwards.’

  * * *

  The phone call came in the afternoon but she nearly didn’t pick up. Clive and Ellis were in a heated discussion about whether the scandalous rumours that had just provoked Jeremy Thorpe’s resignation as leader of the Liberal Party were true or actually a conspiracy by the South African security services. No amount of swearing or balled up paper missiles from their colleagues on the floor seemed likely to get them to take their expletive-filled argument elsewhere. And what with the clatter of typewriters and numerous phones ringing, Sylvia didn’t realise for a moment that this one was hers.

  ‘You’re in luck, Ms Tallis.’ The female voice on the line was brusque, sharp, business-like. ‘Anne Warburton will see you on the seventeenth of May at the embassy in Copenhagen, four o’clock sharp.’

  Sylvia’s stomach leaped. She’d got it. She’d got the damn scoop.

  ‘That’s fantastic news, thank you so much.’ She lodged the receiver under her chin and reached for her diary. The secretary hadn’t said it as a question and Sylvia didn’t take it as one. This wasn’t something you turned down. She flicked over a page to the seventeenth of May and read the single entry: Guys Hospital, 3pm. Shit. Greenham had said it was important, something about monitoring her blood pressure.

  She hesitated, twirling the phone cord around her hand, knowing as she said it, that she shouldn’t. ‘I don’t suppose by any chance Ms Warburton could do the sixteenth of May instead?’

  There was a pause on the line and Sylvia could picture the pursed lips and steely gaze of a diplomatic secretary who knows her own importance. Formidable, that’s how she’d heard Warburton described – clearly, her secretary was following her example.

  ‘No, Ms Tallis, she cannot. I shouldn’t have to remind you that this opportunity is not being afforded to any other journalist and you would do well to seize it when offered.’

  She stared at the diary, put her hand on her stomach and felt the gentle swell. She could go to the hospital another time, surely. ‘Yes, absolutely, I’ll be there on the seventeenth.’

  She put the phone down, picked up a pen and crossed out the hospital appointment.

  ‘Tallis. Why the smug grin?’ Max walked back to his desk with a mug of Betty’s coffee in his hand, an industrial strength brew that powered most of the office through the afternoons.

  ‘Warburton. I got her, Max.’ Sylvia blew out a long breath and sat back in her chair. She couldn’t take it in. The only British journalist to get an interview. An exclusive. This would be it. This would be the piece to give her career lift-off. And how apt that it should be about Anne Warburton, a trailblazer in a man’s world, whether she intended to be or not. Sylvia had admired the woman ever since she’d heard about her appointment by Callaghan, and last week she’d pored over the pictures of the ceremony in Copenhagen, when Warburton presented herself to Queen Margrethe, wondering what it must feel like to be in such a position.

  ‘Well, if you can get her then she’s yours, Tallis,’ Roger had said when she proposed the idea in the features meeting to snorts of derision. ‘I hear she isn’t giving any interviews at all.’

  Well, she wasn’t – apart from one, now, to her.

  ‘Fucking well done,’ Max said.

  ‘Don’t talk to the lady like that, Harmer.’

  Sylvia turned at Clive’s voice and saw him stroll over to their desks. His argument with Ellis had clearly come to an end but the rancour was still evident in his face.

  ‘I appreciate your concern, Clive, but the lady feels that swearing is entirely appropriate at this point in time,’ she said, before beaming at Max. ‘Thanks very fucking much.’

  Clive rolled his eyes. ‘Why the excitement?’

  ‘Sylvia just pinned down Warburton for an interview.’

  ‘The new ambassador to Denmark?’

  ‘Britain’s first female ambassador, may I remind you,’ Sylvia said.

  Clive pursed his lips in an expression of begrudging respect tinged with something else – jealousy, perhaps? ‘She’s granted an interview to you?’

  ‘She has. It’s an exclusive.’

  ‘That’s seriously fantastic, Sylvia. Roger might even crack a bloody smile,’ Max said.

  ‘Yes, well done, Tallis,’ Clive said, and Sylvia saw how much it pained him to say it. ‘I suppose she would want a woman so she’ll get less of a grilling.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Clive.’ She’d learnt in the past year to become inured to Clive’s little comments. Keep calm and carry on – the wartime phrase came back to her and it felt apt. This is what she did. This is how she would get ahead. Not by shouting louder than the men, but by staying focused, working hard and forging ahead with quiet determination. From what she knew of Warburton, she thought she would approve.

  * * *

  She nearly forgot to get off the tube at Kennington, so unused was she to their new home. Either it was that, or her daydreams about her new assignment were proving more than a little distracting. She walked slowly along the street to the flat, pausing once or twice to catch her breath. She’d been dogged by breathlessness in recent days. She still had occasional bouts of sickness, and last week she’d had an insatiable desire to drink milk. Her body was changing, responding to the new life inside her, insisting its presence as hard as she tried to forget.

  At the house she fumbled with the keys, found the right one at the second attempt, walked along the musty corridor and opened the flat door.

  ‘Jim?’

  ‘In here!’

  His words echoed in the near-empty flat. The plan was to go furniture shopping at the weekend. ‘We can choose paint for the nursery, and maybe a cot – or is it too early?’ Jim had said, while Sylvia wondered if she’d have time to nip to Selfridge’s to get that copycat Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress she’d seen in her paper’s fashion pages. Anyway, she sort of liked the flat this way for now – a blank canvas, a space to create whatever they wanted, hopefully something they both liked.

  ‘Guess what happened today?’ She shrugged off her coat and draped it over the back of their one chair, an old red velvet armchair Jim had picked up in a second-hand shop in Oxford eons ago. She had been initially dismayed to see the tatty old thing had joined them in their new place. But at least it was somewhere to sit.

  ‘You got a pay rise?’ Jim came in from the kitchen and kissed her.

  ‘Nope. As if.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Another foreign assignment! I’m going to Denmark to interview Anne Warburton.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Warburton, she’s Britain’s first female ambassador.’

  ‘I know who she is.’

  ‘Right, well, I put in a request to interview her and the whole features desk practically laughed in my face, said it was common knowledge she wasn’t granting interviews to anyone… and then today, they called me and said yes! You should have seen Clive’s face. Well I suppose she thinks a woman will go easy on her,’ she adopted Clive’s haughty tone and dropped her chin to mimic his fleshy face, expecting Jim to laugh, but he didn’t. ‘What? Don’t you think it’s exciting?’

  Jim put his hands on her shoulders, kissed her forehead. ‘Darling, you know I’m crazily proud of you. But—’

  ‘There’s a “but”?’

  He put his hands up in a defensive gesture. ‘But, I think things are different now. I don’t think you should be going away on foreign trips. There’s the baby to think of.’

  ‘The baby goes with me, obviously.’ She patted her stomach.

  ‘Well if you’re going to be facetious.’

  ‘What’s the problem with me going abroad?’

  ‘In your state, maybe it’s not wise.’

  ‘I’m pregnant, not ill. And I’m only a few months gone.’

  ‘Foreign travel can be tiring. You don’t want to take any
risks with your health, or the baby’s. Can you just tell Roger you’d prefer domestic assignments for now?’

  ‘No, because I wouldn’t, and there’s no reason to.’

  ‘I think there is. And I’m the father, I do have a say.’

  ‘Your say is wrong. I’m perfectly healthy, the midwife said so.’ She swallowed her own lie. She’d rebook it – at a convenient time.

  ‘Syl, I know your career is important to you, and it’s fantastic you’re doing so well, but it’s not as important as our child, is it? I mean, you’re going to have to give it up anyway.’

  ‘Am I?’ Her thoughts flicked to Superwoman, the book Maggie had given her, and the page she’d read on the tube home. Two requisites for a working mother are stamina and an understanding family. Well, she had the first one.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘For a while at least. I mean, you wouldn’t want to leave a tiny baby with a stranger, would you?’

  ‘You sound like your mother.’ She knew that would sting, and indeed she saw annoyance spark briefly in his eyes before his usual calmness returned.

  ‘Maybe this time my mother has a point.’

  It helps to realise that husbands can be unconsciously selfish, emotional and unreasonable about the working wife situation, Shirley Conran had written. Therefore it may be unreasonable of you to expect him to be reasonable. Like hell it was.

  ‘And I suppose you’d be happy to give up your career just like that?’ she said.

  Jim looked confused and she felt like slapping him out of it.

  ‘I’m not the one who’s pregnant.’

  ‘No, that’s right. So don’t assume to know what a pregnant woman can or cannot do. I will go to Denmark, because I want to, because our baby will be perfectly all right, and because I have no intention of giving up my career. And if you don’t like that, Jim, well you’re just going to have to get used to the idea.’