‘What’s this about, Michel?’
He breathes out, shakes his head. ‘Oh, something quite important has happened. The enfants placés are finally going to be given compensation.’
‘Sorry, the what?’
He hesitates. ‘It’s not something Switzerland talks about very much.’ He pauses and frowns. ‘It concerns children who were taken away from their families by the government.’
I raise my eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It was government policy for decades, right up until the late seventies, early eighties. If the authorities decided a child wasn’t being brought up properly then they would take them away and either put them in an institution or place them with another family, often on a farm.’
‘Like in foster care, you mean.’
‘I guess so, but some of them didn’t end up being very cared for. They were considered more like unpaid workers and sometimes treated very badly. Beaten, not fed properly, not allowed to go to school. Some were sexually abused. Others were sterilised against their will.’
‘Wow.’ I sit forward, my eyes on the woman on the screen. I thought Switzerland was cows and chocolate and bankers, not this. ‘I’ve never heard of this before.’
‘I’m not surprised. The country is only recently talking about it properly. It’s been a… shameful secret, I guess.’
The woman in the report is now standing next to a man – her lawyer, I presume – who is reading a statement to camera. The thought of what she may have been through when she was a child, and how that may have affected her life ever since, makes me shiver.
‘The government apologised a few years ago. Now all the surviving victims will get compensation and I think there will be some study into why it happened,’ Michel says. ‘It’s about time.’
I don’t understand what the reporter is saying, but I can see how much it means to the woman on the screen, and the other people around her. A chill slithers down the back of my neck. I may have been through hell in the last few years, but my childhood was safe, secure and loving. How many of these children had that?
‘How many were there?’
Michel shrugs, shakes his head. ‘I don’t know exactly. Thousands, I think.’ His phone begins to ring and he fishes it out of his pocket. ‘Excuse me,’ he says to me with an apologetic smile. He gets up from his chair and walks into the kitchen area, phone to his ear. ‘Chérie, ça va?’ I hear, and that’s the extent of my understanding as he rattles off something in French.
A moment later he comes back to the sofa. ‘That was Julia. There are major delays on the trains and she can’t get back from the office so I’m going to drive to get her now. Are you okay to stay here?’
It’s late, and I’d almost forgotten Julia was meant to be here too, so infrequently do I see her. I don’t really want her to come back, to spoil the easy camaraderie that exists between Michel and I when she’s not here. But I shrug and smile my agreement. I’m not going anywhere. ‘Of course.’
He taps my arm in thanks, just lightly. ‘You’re a star,’ he says, and I beam back, warmth sliding into my cheeks. He grabs his keys from the kitchen work surface and I hear him walk down the corridor and shut the front door. Moments later the engine of his Mercedes fades up the road and all I’m left with is silence, and the dignified smile of the woman on the television.
JUNE 1976 Lausanne, Switzerland
SYLVIA
When she was eight, Sylvia walked home from primary school to Maggie’s house one day to find Maggie’s mother sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with two other women. All three were pregnant, their bellies in various degrees of expansion, but all, to Sylvia’s eyes, weirdly, grotesquely bloated. One was balancing a mug on her belly, the steam rising into the kitchen. Another was so big she couldn’t sit right up against the table because her bump was in the way. As for Maggie’s mother, when she saw them she stood up and her large stomach momentarily threw her off balance so she swayed backwards and steadied herself against the kitchen worktop. Whoopsadaisy! she’d said and laughed, because it was funny, or at least Sylvia could see now, looking back, that it was. But back then, aged eight, she didn’t think so. The women’s overblown bellies shocked her, bewildered her, their laughter was confusing. Soon they descended into hysterics, tears rolling down their faces, and Sylvia remembered being appalled. It wasn’t funny, this strange inflation act that had somehow been performed on all three of them. It wasn’t funny at all.
The memory came back to her as she stood in the apartment, listening to Evelyne explain how Daniel and Anna had arrived that morning and needed to stay with her for a while. Something about having run away, left the family farm. She remembered what Evelyne had told her when she’d first met her brother: He’s had a falling out with our father. Again. It happens a couple of times a year at least. She guessed it was just a repeat performance – only this time he had his pregnant girlfriend in tow.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Evelyne said in a quiet voice, though Sylvia was sure from Anna’s blank expression that the girl couldn’t understand French in any case. ‘I didn’t know they were coming, it’s all a bit of a shock…’ she trailed off, her eyes flicking to Anna’s belly, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she saw. ‘Monique will put you up. She’s just around the corner. Would you mind? We’ll still spend the weekend together, go to the festival. I can’t throw them out and there’s no space for another guest.’
‘No problem at all,’ Sylvia said. She put her hand on Evelyne’s arm, keen to quell her obvious stress at these unexpected guests. ‘I don’t mind where I stay.’
She looked over at Anna, sitting neatly on the sofa. They were clearly at a similar stage of pregnancy, their bellies swelled not to the extent of the three women in the kitchen so many years ago but enough to be obvious, unless you were trying to hide it. But that’s where the physical resemblance ended. Anna was so thin, so young, all spindly arms and big eyes. Sixteen and pregnant? Sylvia couldn’t contemplate it – it was daunting enough at her age. She thought back to when she met Daniel, how surly he was, how preoccupied, and his words at the march: I just think everyone should be free to do what they want in life. Is this what he wanted – a baby, at just nineteen himself? Somehow, Sylvia doubted it.
* * *
For some reason the girl’s face stayed with her all night, as she slept in a corner of Monique’s living room, partitioned off with a tie-dyed sarong. And it was still with her in the morning, when Evelyne picked her up in her van to drive to the festival, which she explained was being held in a disused warehouse on the edge of town. Evelyne seemed less anxious than the night before, back to being the garrulous, energetic woman Sylvia remembered from her last visit, and she was clearly excited about the event she’d spent many weeks helping to organise. They were expecting hundreds of women from all over the area, she said. There would be small group sessions devoted to divorce, to sex, to marriage issues and family life, debates on abortion and contraception and homosexuality, as well as food and music and dancing. They’d even invited a ‘self-help’ guru from California to lead a session on getting to know your body’s intimate parts and reclaiming pleasure.
‘Nothing’s taboo!’ Evelyne said breezily, and Sylvia couldn’t help but laugh at what Jim’s mother would say if she knew what her daughter-in-law was doing instead of playing the dutiful wife as Jim showed them around the new flat. The thought reminded her of everything that had changed in her life since she was last in Switzerland and she wondered if she had inadvertently let the side down by becoming a married pregnant woman, if this radical young Swiss feminist would disapprove of her slide into convention.
Evelyne seemed to read her mind. ‘Congratulations, by the way,’ she said, nodding at Sylvia’s stomach. ‘It suits you.’ To Sylvia’s relief, there was no judgement in her tone.
‘Thanks,’ she replied. ‘It wasn’t exactly planned.’
‘But at least you had a choice.’
‘Yes,’ Sylvia said,
thinking of the teary-eyed young girls in the clinic and the doctor’s stern voice and her inability to go through with it. ‘I did.’
‘And you’re not sixteen.’ Evelyne sighed, and Sylvia heard the stress come back into her tone. She didn’t need another opportunity to ask more.
‘So, who is Anna exactly?’
‘Daniel’s girlfriend, apparently.’ Evelyne laughed, shook her head. ‘I can’t quite get my head around that.’
‘You didn’t know he had a girlfriend?’
‘No. But it’s not even that…’ She kept her gaze on the road. ‘Anna lived with us, at the farm. When I left four years ago she was only twelve, just a child. Still is, really. Only now she’s sixteen and pregnant by my brother.’
‘Why did she live with you? She’s a distant relative or something?’
Evelyne raised her eyebrows. ‘No, no. That would be even weirder. She was placed with us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s from a poor family. Her father walked out and her mum couldn’t take care of her, I seem to remember. So Anna was placed with us by the authorities. They paid us to have her.’
Sylvia looked at Evelyne, but she kept her eyes ahead. ‘A foster placement?’
Evelyne shrugged, then laughed. ‘Another pair of hands for Dad to push around, more like.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, she had work to do, like the rest of us. Milking cows, raking hay, mucking out, that kind of stuff. Daniel and I did that too, but I know Anna had it harder than us. Dad was a bit of a taskmaster.’
‘How old was she?’ Sylvia asked, aware this was becoming something of an interview, but she just couldn’t quite understand it.
‘When she arrived? About eight or nine I think.’
‘Didn’t she go to school?’
Evelyne nodded. ‘Initially, but soon after she got to high school my father said there was too much work so she’d have to stay home. I mean, Dad would rather I’d stayed home from school too – he never saw the value of education for girls,’ she said, rolling her eyes and lowering the tone of her voice in what Sylvia took to be a caricature of her father, ‘but I was never going to let that happen. I even threatened to call the authorities on him,’ she laughs. ‘But Anna, well, I guess she couldn’t fight him on it like I did, and no one ever came to check up on her, so she just stayed home. I’d come back after school and she’d look like she was about to fall asleep on her feet. Poor kid. She always looked so damned miserable.’
‘She never saw her own family?’
Evelyne shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She never went anywhere, so I guess not. I know she has a sister, but I think she was placed with some other family.’
Sylvia couldn’t picture that thin, pale girl doing manual labour from the age of eight, far away from any kind of family. The most Sylvia had been away from her folks at that age was for one week, on a school camp in Wales. She’d cried herself to sleep three nights in a row she’d missed her mother so much.
‘So what happens now? They won’t go back to Betten?’
Evelyne laughed. ‘No way – well, not unless they’re caught and she’s forced back. They ran away – and about time too, judging by the size of Anna’s belly. I’m surprised no one’s noticed already. If father had found out, I hate to think what he’d have done. There are institutions where they put young unmarried mothers and force them to give up their babies.’ She shook her head. ‘Just another way the patriarchy is trying to keep women in check, punishing us for having sex before marriage just like men do.’
Sylvia stared at the road. Kids of eight being sent to work on a stranger’s farm? A tyrant of a boss who wouldn’t let her go to school? Running away in fear of the consequences of her pregnancy? It didn’t sound like a decent foster care system to her. ‘She must be pretty scared right now,’ she said.
Evelyne shrugged. ‘Apparently they’re in love, and Anna thinks that solves everything,’ she laughed. ‘Daniel’s slightly less naive, but still. He hasn’t got a job, Anna didn’t even finish school, and things aren’t exactly economically rosy in Switzerland at the moment. How are they going to cope? They came here because they knew I wouldn’t send them back, and they can stay with me for now, but it can’t be a permanent arrangement. It’s a tiny one-bed flat and I can’t afford to feed all three of us.’ She shook her head. ‘They’ve got a hard road ahead, that’s for sure.’
Sylvia nodded. No doubt. But it sounded like Anna had had a pretty hard road to get here, too.
* * *
The festival was like nothing Sylvia had ever been to before. The large warehouse was loosely divided into different areas by makeshift walls made of cardboard boxes. Each one was dedicated to a certain issue, with participating women sitting cross-legged on the floor in a ‘circle of trust’. As Evelyne had promised, nothing was taboo, and it wasn’t long before the passionate women from the MFL had their visitors opening up about the things that were important to them: domineering husbands, medical issues that male doctors dismissed as unimportant, boredom and frustration over endless housework and child-rearing, or their inability to find a nursery place so they could get a job. Sylvia saw women break down in tears because they were pregnant and didn’t want to be, others picking up leaflets about divorce, contraception and commune living. Outside, in the car park of the warehouse, a folk band was playing while people sang and danced and laughed in the sun, and a group of young men stood talking under a tree, toddlers at their feet. Sylvia was struck by the atmosphere: one of warmth and understanding and solidarity, one where women could simply be themselves, unimpeded by society’s constraints or expectations.
If only real life was like this, she thought, her head conjuring a picture of Roger’s face when he took the Warburton interview off her; Jim’s voice when he said you’re going to have to give up your job anyway. If only everything wasn’t such a fight all the time.
* * *
The festival over, Evelyne wanted to relax the next day, so they didn’t go far in her van that Sunday. Lutry was a pretty medieval village just a short drive from Lausanne, and by mid-morning it was already full of people strolling along the lakeside, swimming, eating ice cream, making the most of the good weather. It was probably as hot as London – Evelyne had told her the drought was proving as damaging to Swiss farming as it was in the UK – but it felt different out here, without the airless smog and the bitter tang of exhaust fumes, with the breeze from the lake and the clear, clean water to dip toes into.
After everything Evelyne had told her about Anna, Sylvia yearned to talk to the girl directly – but she couldn’t. Anna didn’t speak English or much French, and Sylvia’s very basic school German wasn’t going to get her very far. So, with the two of them sitting together on the grass, while Daniel and Evelyne walked along the lakeshore, deep in serious conversation, Sylvia felt stymied – and she was sure Anna was feeling the same. The girl was looking at her, a shy smile on her face. She put her hand on her stomach, then pointed to Sylvia before making a thumbs up. Sylvia laughed, nodded, gestured back. ‘Okay?’
Anna nodded and held up five fingers, pointing to her stomach. Judging by the similar size of their bellies, Sylvia supposed that meant five months gone, just like her. She repeated the gesture, holding up five fingers, and Anna smiled so her whole face lit up.
She looked so young. Sylvia felt a sudden pang of sympathy for her – what must she be feeling, to have a baby coming and no job, no home, no parents in the picture and such a tough upbringing? And there was she, with a husband, a nice flat she’d currently deserted, a job with a regular salary and the right to return to it after maternity leave.
What would Anna think of her, if she knew? Would she think Sylvia ungrateful not to be as delighted with her pregnancy as Anna clearly was with hers? She wished she could tell her that she was rooting for her, that she hoped everything would go well for her, that her future would be better than her past. But she couldn’t, so instead she fished arou
nd in her bag and found a packet of English sweets she’d picked up at Heathrow.
She held it out to Anna and the girl took one with a smile. Merci.
Sylvia took one too and they both sat back on the grass, the sun on their faces, their mouths full of caramel sweetness.
Down by the lakeshore, Evelyne and Daniel were standing ankle deep in the water, facing each other, their conversation clearly heated. Sylvia glanced at Anna and saw she was looking at them too, her eyes shiny. Spontaneously, Sylvia reached out and squeezed her hand. Anna turned to her and smiled, a smile full of fear and sadness and uncertainty and hope, and in that moment Sylvia knew they understood each other perfectly, despite the language barrier. However dissimilar their backgrounds and however big the gulf between their futures was likely to be, here, in this moment, on the lakeshore at Lutry, they weren’t so different after all.
JULY 2016 Thun/Reichenbach, Switzerland
JESS
On Sunday morning I get on a train heading for Visp, where I’ll change for a second one bound for Thun. In my phone’s maps I’ve pinned Hopfenweg 31, the place that could prove the key to everything. The usual guilt about Dad unfurls in my chest as I watch the houses and fields and orchards go by, but I push it away. I won’t feel guilty about something that’s not my fault. I won’t feel guilty for needing to know who I am. Perhaps, later today, I’ll find that out. My stomach plunges at the thought. I don’t know if I’m ready.
According to my phone it’s only a ten-minute walk from the station to the address on Julia’s letter. I dither for a minute and then walk under the railway bridge. Soon I’m in what appears to be the town centre. A river of milky turquoise water rushes between two streets, the railings sporting flowerboxes spilling yellow and pink and orange. I lean over the rail, watching the torrent below. Glacial meltwater probably, travelling who knows where on its long journey from the mountains I see in the distance far above. I wonder what it would be like to jump in and be carried along, unable to go anywhere but where the water takes me. No decisions, no responsibility, entirely in the hands of the current transporting me on its inevitable path.
The Other Daughter Page 18
