The Other Daughter

by Caroline Bishop

  Not Dad’s. A shade darker than Mum’s.

  ‘This must seem strange to you, to have me here in the evening instead of Michel,’ she says.

  I shake my head, smile. ‘Well, maybe a little.’ The kids went to bed half an hour ago and it does seem odd to be sitting here with her while Michel’s in a bar helping to drown the sorrows of some workmate going through a break-up. I don’t know how to be around Julia, so little time do I spend with her. And now, sitting next to her, I feel her presence cast a shadow over mine, as though her beauty and poise and confidence are erasing me to a faint blur.

  ‘I’m glad we finally have this time to chat. I can’t believe how crazy it’s been at work, and then with Léa’s birthday and everything, I feel I haven’t had the chance to catch up with you, to see how it’s going.’

  I take a sip, swallow. ‘It’s going well, I think.’

  ‘The children just love you! Léa doesn’t stop talking about you.’ She puts her glass to her lips and I wonder if it’s to mask the forced smile she can’t quite make real.

  ‘I’m glad. They’re great kids.’ If Julia is their daughter, that would make Léa and Luca Dad’s grandchildren. He’d have what I know he always wanted. The thought curls into a hard knot of pain in my chest. They’d be his blood – but not mine, never mine.

  Julia takes a sip of wine and puts the glass back on the table. ‘You’re halfway through already! How have you found Switzerland so far?’

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I say. ‘Another life.’

  ‘Will you stay? I mean, I’m sorry we can’t offer you longer. Once the kids are at school there won’t be any need, since we can put them in after-school club. But if you want to stay and find another job as an English teacher, at an international school perhaps, I could help you look.’ She pauses. ‘Or maybe you’d want another position in a family, like this. Less stressful than in a school, I imagine.’ She smiles, and I catch the condescending undertone to her words: you obviously have no career ambition, unlike me. But I won’t rise to it.

  ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ I say.

  She’s not on Facebook. So I either need to think of an excuse to ask when her birthday is or find out another way. I think her age was stated on her marriage certificate, but I can’t remember what it said. Maybe I’ll have to go in there again and look.

  I think of Jorge’s anger, the platitudes I gave him. No more snooping, I promise. But things are different now.

  ‘Things have been a little tricky for me lately. I need to make a fresh start, but I’m still figuring out what that should be.’

  ‘Oh,’ she frowns. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She takes a sip of her drink and then cocks her head, smiles. ‘It’s never too late to start over, though, is it?’

  I smile, thinking of the several failed rounds of IVF, the years of trying and failing, another rod on the back of our marriage when it clearly wasn’t strong enough. I think of Patrick’s email and my approaching fortieth birthday in the autumn, and I think that, yes, for some things it is too late. But she doesn’t know how that feels since everything’s been so easy for her.

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘Here would be a good place to try. I can see it’s wonderful to live here. You’re very lucky.’

  ‘Yes, we are,’ she says. ‘But in a way you make your own luck, don’t you?’

  Sometimes, I think. And other times things just happen to you that you have absolutely no control over. I wonder what it would feel like to tell her. To tell her she isn’t who she thinks she is, that her parents aren’t her own, that she wasn’t meant to have this lucky, lucky life. But if I inflicted that pain on her, then I’d be inflicting far worse on myself, because if she was the other daughter then I’d have another question, a question I don’t think I’d want to know the answer to: would Mum and Dad have preferred her – this ambitious, beautiful, sorted woman who’s managed to have it all – instead of me?

  * * *

  I have to wait for a quiet moment one sunny mid-week morning to sneak back into Julia and Michel’s bedroom. Maria won’t be round until 2pm. Léa and Luca are outside in the garden. I know I don’t have long before I’ll have to be out there breaking up a squabble or tending to a mild injury. But that’s okay, because I don’t intend to be long. I know what I want.

  September eighteenth. That’s when Léa said Julia’s birthday was when I asked her. Couldn’t remember how old she was though. Part of me feels relieved. But the other part feels an ominous sense of foreboding. Okay, so we don’t share a birthday, but we’re only two weeks apart – or could be, if Julia’s my age.

  I go straight for the drawer and slide it open. I riffle through the contents until I get to the folder I saw before. I open it, flick through the papers and take out the marriage certificate. Their ages are written next to their names: Julia Sarah Meier, 26; Michel Jean-Pierre Chevalley, 29. I quickly do the maths and my stomach plunges to realise that yes, she’s my age. Julia will be forty in September – just two weeks after me. I put the marriage certificate back and take out the letter from A. Meier that I found last time. Could this be Julia’s mother? I unfold the paper and run my hand over the ink. I can’t understand a word but the handwriting is beautiful. I copy the address into my journal. Hopfenweg 31, Thun. It’s dated 2004. She’s probably long gone.

  My phone pings and I jump like a rabbit at a gun, my elbow knocking into the dressing table. One of Julia’s necklaces falls off the side of the mirror onto the wooden top. A bead smashes. Shit. My heart races as I wait, listening, hoping no footsteps are coming down the hall. But there’s nothing. I take my phone out of my back pocket and open the message.

  Hola guapa. Hope you’re dealing ok with all your crazy shit. I’m playing with my band at a jazz club in Lausanne on Thursday night. If you can get away, come?

  Bloody Jorge. Is he psychic? Can he sense I’m in here? My shame rises as though he’s caught me all over again.

  I return the phone to my pocket and examine the damage. Just one of the beads is broken, but it seems a clean break – fixable, I hope. I pick up the pieces and put them in my pocket along with the rest of the necklace. I fold up the letter, return it to where it was in the folder and slot the folder back into the drawer. I want to root around further, see if there’s any evidence of Julia’s parentage, but Jorge’s text has unnerved me, as though he’s watching me, and I’ve already done enough damage. So I stand up from the bed, smooth away the indent on the duvet cover, and slip out of the room.

  I dish out ice lollies to the kids and the three of us sit on the grass in silence, the sun on our faces and sticky orange sliding down our fingers. With my other hand I take out my phone and open maps, type in Thun. It could be her. Julia’s A. Meier could be my Anna Meier. My birth mother. Perhaps she’s still there, or perhaps she left years ago.

  The only way to know is to go and find out.

  * * *

  I fix Julia’s necklace late at night when the rest of the house is in bed. There’s an uncommon stillness that’s slightly eerie in a home usually so full of noise. I sit cocooned in the low glow of my bedroom and wallow in the welcome quiet.

  I piece the fragments of the broken bead back together and glue them with a fixative I found in the kitchen drawer. I don’t understand what it says on the tube, but it looks like the sturdy kind of stuff I’ve used at home. I wonder what my tenant is doing now. Lying in the bed I once shared with Patrick, perhaps. Or maybe watching a film, making herself a cup of tea with my kettle.

  I take my time, carefully pushing the pieces together and scraping the excess glue away when it oozes out. I don’t want the cracks to show; I don’t want Julia to know I’ve been in there, snooping.

  I won’t do it again. I’ll just pop in briefly one day when everyone’s out so I can put the necklace back, hopefully before Julia’s missed it. There were so many necklaces hanging from the mirror that I somehow doubt she’ll notice.

  I lie back on my bed waiting for the glue to dry. My hand goes t
o my neck, touches the delicate silver chain I wear every day, the one Mum gave me on my wedding day. I remember how her eyes filled up and how that shocked me, because forthright, confident, stoic Mum never cried. Took her back to her own, she said. Stirred up memories.

  You were there too, even though you weren’t meant to be. That’s what Dad always used to say to me, before the DNA tests proved that I wasn’t actually there at all.

  We used to laugh about it. A shotgun wedding, the family scandal. It gives me cold shivers now, because who was there? Could it possibly, unfathomably, have been Julia?

  My breath starts to come faster and I feel my pulse speed up. Sweat breaks out on the back of my neck and I’m suddenly shaking. I focus hard to control the panic. A long breath in, hold, slowly out.

  When my hands stop shaking, I pick up Julia’s necklace again and inspect it, examining the tiny trails across the surface of the once-broken bead. Hardly noticeable. Particularly if you didn’t know it was ever broken. And only I know that.

  JUNE 1976 London, UK

  SYLVIA

  Heat draped itself across her shoulders. It whispered hot breath on her neck, ran clammy fingers between her breasts, dribbled down her forehead. Strands of hair stuck to her temples and sweat trickled under her arms beneath the light cream shirt that today felt as heavy as sheepskin. It was only ten in the morning and yet they were all simmering like rabbits in stew.

  ‘Don’t these fans work?’ Sylvia shook a cold carton of chocolate milk she’d picked up on the way in after an unbearable tube journey. She punched in the straw and sucked down the cool sweet liquid in greedy gulps.

  Max shrugged. ‘Too hot for them to work properly, according to maintenance.’

  Sylvia sighed. ‘Well, I know the feeling.’

  ‘D’you know what?’ Max grinned. ‘Yesterday the umpires at Wimbledon were actually allowed to take their bloody jackets off.’

  She laughed. ‘I know, I saw it on the news. First time ever, apparently.’ She loved Wimbledon, with its sense of history, its manicured lawns and its quirky traditions. Despite everything else that was happening – the drought, the economy in meltdown, scandals rocking the political establishment – Wimbledon would carry on, upholding Britishness for two weeks in a small pocket of SW19.

  Jim always laughed at her obsession with it. ‘You pride yourself on striving to be different, and yet you’re addicted to this British institution that’s allergic to change.’

  He was right, of course. It should have riled her, this fusty institution that was refusing to give women equal prize money despite a threatened boycott, but there was something about the bright white outfits, the almost-whisper of the commentator’s voice and the silence between points that calmed her. It was a hiatus from real life, a pocket of serenity in a tumultuous world.

  ‘They’re talking about fucking weeks of this ahead, apparently,’ Max said.

  ‘Surely not?’

  ‘We’re leading with “Hotter than Honolulu” in tonight’s edition.’

  Sylvia rolled her eyes. ‘Only in Britain is the weather news.’

  But she had to admit, this felt newsworthy. At first it had been a novelty, the papers full of photos of swimmers in the Serpentine, city workers cooling their feet in Trafalgar Square’s fountains and Brighton’s beaches packed with weekenders escaping the city. But as the heatwave continued, day after day, touching ninety degrees, it was as though London was caught in a pressure cooker. She saw its effects in the office workers flaked out in St Paul’s churchyard every lunchtime, in the sluggish steps of pedestrians on Fleet Street, walking as though carrying the heat on their backs, and in the general irritation that seemed to have infected the office. Sharp voices down the telephone, arguments in the corridors, more expletives than usual, a constant hum of exasperation. It was surely the heat that had Roger stalking the newsroom like an injured bear, the heat that changed his demeanour from merely wearily gruff to downright angry, the heat that made him dismiss any feature idea she proposed in the weekly meetings without a hint of discussion. The progress she felt she’d made with her Switzerland feature had melted away like an ice lolly in the sun.

  But of course it wasn’t just the heat. She was being punished, she knew, not only for letting the side down by being such a stereotypical woman as to put babies before career, but for losing the paper the Warburton interview. It turned out that Britain’s first female ambassador hadn’t taken kindly to being told the journalist who was gifted the UK media’s only interview with her wouldn’t be taking up the opportunity after all. Initially, after first Max and then Roger got off the phone to Warburton’s secretary, clearly bruised by the experience, Sylvia had allowed herself just the briefest moment of self-satisfaction.

  See! she wanted to say, Warburton wanted me, not Max, so you should have let me go.

  She even wondered, for a minute, if Roger would change his mind and send her after all, but he didn’t, and the opportunity was lost. It felt as if he’d been taking it out on her ever since.

  Sylvia chucked the empty carton of chocolate milk in the bin and turned back to the blank piece of paper in her typewriter. She had an hour to write some scintillating lifestyle tips for the ‘at home’ feature. How to keep the flowers in your garden hydrated during a hosepipe ban. A recipe for potato salad to go with barbecued meats. Tips on how to keep cool making love during a heatwave (Valerie’s idea). A tried-and-tested way of giving dry, brittle fingernails a DIY moisture boost. Twice a week for two months, soak your fingers in a bowl of warm olive oil for five minutes… Frankly, her heart wasn’t in it. She wanted to just get up and leave. She yearned to escape London’s suffocating grip and head for the mountain air of Switzerland; away from the heat, from Roger, from her unwanted future. Thankfully, in a few days that’s exactly what she would do.

  He rang, as he had every day, in the early afternoon.

  ‘If you come back, I’ll get rid of that armchair you hate.’

  Sylvia smiled down the line despite herself. ‘That’s hardly the point, Jim.’

  ‘I know, I know. But I don’t know what else to do, Syl. I’ve said I’m sorry for not… understanding. I’m trying, okay? I’m trying to understand why you’re so mad about having our baby. But I need you here. You’re my wife, my pregnant wife, we should be living together.’

  ‘I can’t talk about this now.’ She stared down the room, watched Valerie standing behind Ellis’s shoulder, leaning over him as she looked at something on his desk. She laughed, put a hand lightly on his arm.

  Sylvia knew Jim had nothing to do with Roger finding out about the baby. Take care of yourselves, Valerie had said.

  Of course it could only be a woman, a woman with two of her own, who would recognise the signs. And Sylvia couldn’t help but think that Valerie had not only told Roger about her pregnancy, but also encouraged him to take the Warburton interview off her. You’ll be having my job if I’m not careful…

  ‘You always say that. So when, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Meet me after work?’

  ‘No. I have to pack.’

  She could picture him shaking his head, biting his tongue. She knew he wouldn’t dare try and stop her going.

  ‘My parents are meant to be coming down on Saturday. What do I say?’

  ‘Just tell the truth. I had to go to Switzerland.’

  ‘Syl…’

  She sighed, twirled the phone cord around her finger, studied Max mumbling to himself as he jabbed at his typewriter, trying to conjure the right words. She wondered if Jim did that too. She’d never seen him at work, nor had he her – apart from those early days on their student paper. They each had their own daytime world when they existed outside of coupledom, and she loved that. If she didn’t have her job, what would she have to tell him at the end of each day? She couldn’t imagine hearing about his day at work and only being able to offer up talk of children’s parties and nappies in return. But Maggie was right, this couldn’
t go on.

  ‘I’m not punishing him,’ she’d said to Maggie, repeatedly, after one post-argument night back at her old flat turned into a few days, and then a few weeks.

  ‘You just need some space, yes, I know.’ Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘Well, you haven’t exactly got it here.’

  That was certainly true. Maggie’s bedroom seemed so much smaller and more cluttered than Sylvia had ever noticed when she actually lived in the flat. She’d never quite realised what a hoarder Maggie was. Every surface in her room was covered with trinkets from her travels, stuffed toys, funny postcards sent by friends years ago, pictures in dusty old frames. And then there were the sketches, and paint swatches on paper with scribbled notes next to them – one of these colours for the emperor’s palace walls? Ask John which he prefers – and the cardboard models of sets, evidence of Maggie’s job, of her future, marching on, exactly in the way she’d worked so hard to have it.

  As Sylvia lay in the single bed that first morning – ‘You’re pregnant, I can hardly make you sleep on the floor,’ Maggie had said, forming the sofa cushions into a makeshift mattress on the bedroom carpet for herself – she heard Maggie’s new flatmate Rose come out of her old room and head for the shower, and a pang of regret socked her in the stomach like a physical blow. Things were moving on without her, continuing in their intended direction as she moved off on a tangent.

  This wasn’t how it was meant to be.

  ‘Life isn’t a straight line, Syl darling. Haven’t you figured that out by now?’ Maggie had said.

  ‘I want it to be.’

  Maggie laughed. ‘What, and give up spontaneity, the excitement of the unknown? Don’t be silly.’

  Sylvia propped herself up on her elbow and looked at her friend. ‘I’ve fought hard to be on this path and I want to stay on it.’

  ‘I know you have. So have I. But things happen – or don’t happen – that aren’t always of your making and you just have to deal with them. I didn’t want to be a bank teller, but I dealt with it. And I’m sure there’ll be more things thrown at me in the future that I don’t necessarily want. But that’s what life is about. It happens to everyone.’ Maggie flopped down on her pillow. ‘Plenty of women would kill to be in your situation, you know.’ Her voice was soft. ‘It may not be where you imagined you’d be right now, but that doesn’t make it bad. You’ve just got to accept it and do your best to make it a success. And I know you can, because you’re you, and that’s what you do.’