My eyes start to blur from the movement of the water and I pull back from the railing. I know I don’t have that luxury. I have to actually make a decision and I suppose I know what that decision is going to be. I’ve come this far, after all.
Hopfenweg is a quiet residential street flanked by large detached houses with red tiles on the roofs and coloured wooden shutters. There’s no traffic and I walk in the middle of the road, scouring the letterboxes for house numbers. I find thirty-one easily. It’s a large cream house with red shutters and a wooden front door below a porch with a little pointed roof. I switch off my brain before it can start an argument in my head, step up to the door and ring the bell.
The woman who opens it looks to be in her fifties. She’s wearing jeans and a green T-shirt, with clearly dyed dark brown hair and red-framed glasses. She says a word in German that I couldn’t possibly replicate and smiles, her face open, curious.
I suddenly haven’t a clue what to say. ‘Hello,’ I start, and she cocks her head, waits. ‘Do you speak English?’
The woman hesitates. ‘A little.’
‘I, um…’ I feel heat creeping into my cheeks. ‘Are you Frau Meier?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, perhaps you have the wrong house.’ She starts to shut the door.
‘Oh, er, wait, please,’ I say. ‘Do you know if someone called Anna Meier used to live here?’
She looks at me blankly and shrugs. ‘We have lived here for ten years. I do not remember who lived here before us.’
‘Right.’ All the anticipation of potentially finding something out falls away and I feel the tension in my chest dissolve into disappointment.
The woman looks at me. ‘Are you okay?’
I want to go inside, look around, see if I can find something, anything, that might point me towards Anna Meier, or Julia, or both. But I know there won’t be anything left a decade after anyone called Meier moved away. ‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’
Frustration overwhelms me as I walk back into town. Every tiny lead I have turns out to be nothing. I knew it was a long shot, coming to Thun, but I didn’t expect my fledgling mission to be over so quickly.
At the station I scour the board for train times back to Montreux, but my eye is caught by another name. Reichenbach im Kandertal. It takes me a few seconds, and then I remember that’s the place where Daniel Buchs’ hiking club was. I take out my phone and search the online map and realise it’s not that far from here. The train leaves in ten minutes.
I wonder, for the hundredth time, why he hasn’t responded to my last email. Maybe, seeing as I’m so close, I should go and find out why.
* * *
Reichenbach feels different to Thun. Smaller, more rural, more like the Switzerland I imagined when I thought about coming here. It smells of flowers and manure and summer. I walk from the station into the village and pass houses that look like the sort of thing I saw on chocolate boxes at the airport – wooden chalets with weathered shutters and balconies bedecked with flowerpots. Some are clearly very old, their facades decorated with carved patterns, animals depicted in faded paint, words drawn in an elegant calligraphy. Chopped firewood is stacked up in piles under overhanging balconies. Some houses have shopfronts on the ground floor, one’s a bank, another is labelled Gemeindeverwaltung, whatever the hell that is. I stop outside a bakery – that’s clearly what Bäckerei means, even without the visual clue of edible treats in the window.
‘Grüessech,’ says the lady behind the counter after the bell over the door signals my arrival. Given it sounds similar to what the other woman in Thun said to me, I imagine that’s Swiss German for hello.
I point to a macaroon and hold up one finger. She nods, wraps one in paper and hands it to me, saying what I assume is a price.
‘Er, sorry, I don’t speak German.’ I hold out my hand with some change in it and she smiles, takes a few coins.
‘Um, can I ask you something?’
She nods.
‘I’m looking for someone who might live here. His name is Daniel Buchs.’
‘In Reichenbach?’ she frowns. ‘I don’t know, but I only live here recently,’ she says. ‘You ask Linda Keller in the Gasthaus Hirschen. She is here a long time.’
I thank her and leave, finding a wall to sit on and eat my macaroon. I don’t have Daniel Buchs’ address because he wasn’t among the eighty-nine listed in the online phone book. I debate just emailing him and asking him to meet me, but something’s holding me back. I’d rather just find out a bit about him, and then see.
The guesthouse is a large old chalet half a minute’s walk from the bakery. I push open the door and love it immediately for its Swissness. There are hearts carved into the backs of wooden chairs, gingham tablecloths and etchings of mountain scenery on the walls. Though I hardly saw any people outside, in here it’s busy with diners finishing Sunday lunch, the air pungent with the rich smell of hot cheese.
‘Grüessech.’ A youngish woman with an apron around her waist approaches me.
I mumble my best approximation of the word back. ‘Is it possible to speak to Linda Keller, please?’
‘She is in the kitchen. It’s lunchtime. Busy.’ She gestures around the restaurant as though I might not have noticed.
‘I can wait,’ I say. ‘Can I sit over there?’
‘You want to order something?’
I ask for a beer and take a seat at the bar. I feel momentarily self-conscious to be sitting here on my own, but no one else in the restaurant seems to give me a second glance. Soon I relax into the comforting hum of their laughter and chatter, which, though I don’t understand a word, seems universal – the sound of friendship, happiness, home. It’s familiar, and yet it’s odd to find this familiarity when I’m waiting for a stranger in a small village in rural Switzerland, so far away from everything I call home – or used to, at least.
I don’t know where home is anymore.
Not the Greenwich house – that couldn’t be home without Mum in it, and now Dad’s sold up anyway and moved to Chichester. And not the Peckham flat, the place Patrick and I fashioned for ourselves, a place so full of hope for the future when we moved in. That stopped being home after Patrick left. Now, home isn’t a place, but a collection of small things: the smell of flowers in Maggie’s garden, the passenger seat of Dad’s car, an old stuffed toy donkey Mum bought me as a baby, currently locked away from my tenant in a wardrobe with my most precious things back in the flat in Peckham. Familiar things that cumulatively bring me some comfort, but don’t quite make a whole.
Half an hour later there’s still no Linda Keller and I’ve started a second beer. I signal to the waitress and ask if Linda has time to see me now. She nods. ‘I will ask.’
A few minutes later a short, round woman with dark red hair emerges from double doors at the back of the room. She’s wearing an apron and her cheeks are ruddy, as though the lunch service has been particularly strenuous.
‘Grüessech,’ she says. ‘You wanted to speak with me?’
‘Yes, thank you. I’m looking for someone who might live here and the lady in the bakery said you would know.’
‘I know everyone in Reichenbach.’ I swear I see her already ample chest puff out even more.
‘Great. Well, I’m looking for a man named Daniel Buchs.’
She smiles. ‘Oh yes, I know him very well.’
My heart dances. ‘You do?’
‘He comes here at least twice a week for lunch. One of my best customers.’
I look around me, as though he might be here right now, though of course I don’t have a clue what he looks like – the grainy photo on the hiking website gave no more than a rough idea.
‘You’re from England?’ She’s looking at me as though I’m a curiosity.
I nod.
‘I adore Cambridge!’ she says. ‘I love the… what do you say… ponts?’
‘Punts?’
‘Yes, punts! They are tip top!’
�
��They are,’ I agree, though I’ve never been on one, or indeed to Cambridge. ‘So, Daniel Buchs. Could you tell me where he lives?’
She cocks her head. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I’m not a complete stranger. He’s an… acquaintance. We’ve been in contact on email. I was just passing near the village and thought I’d surprise him, but I don’t know where he lives.’
She looks at me and appears to come to the conclusion that I’m not a criminal casing the joint. ‘Kientalstrasse,’ she says.
‘Could you…?’ I pass her a beer mat and fish a pen out of my bag and she takes it, scribbles the address on the back. ‘Thank you,’ I say when she passes it back. ‘Thanks for your—’
‘Such a shame he’s been on his own so long. I don’t know why he never met anyone else. One of our most eligible bachelors!’ She laughs and I smile politely, seeing in her expression a badly veiled longing for someone who, I suspect, has never shown more than a friendly interest in her. ‘I think she put him off for life!’ she adds. ‘I always thought there was something not… correct about her. He’s a very friendly man, but she was… colder. Always something troubling her. Always sad.’
‘Who?’ I drop the pen back into my bag.
‘His former wife,’ she says. ‘Anna.’
* * *
I’ve spent so long thinking that finding my mother was the key to the mystery of my life that I hadn’t considered I might find my father first.
Then again, perhaps he isn’t. He could have been married to her later on, after 1976. But it’s certainly possible that he is the person Anna had a child with back then. And that child could well be me.
It’s probably only a two-minute walk but it takes me a dozen. I sit on a bench by the church – a beautiful white chapel with a tall spire covered in slate tiles – and stare at a field where brown horned cows are grazing, heavy bells around their necks. Part of me wants to head right back to the train station and get as far away as possible, take a plane from Geneva and go back to the UK to see Dad and Maggie and forget I was ever here. But another part is drawing me towards Daniel Buchs’ house, where perhaps, finally, I’ll understand something of who I am.
I take my phone out of my bag and read the last text message I got from Dad.
Nice evening with Bob and Ken in the pub. I won the pool. Going to London to see Maggie’s show tomorrow. I’ll report back. Love Dad x
Nothing could replace the years of Dad being Dad. Nothing could change the memories we share, the interests we have in common, the way we see eye to eye on politics but rarely like the same movies. Our shared eye-rolling at Aunt Jemima’s latest hare-brained project. The way I always tease him about his outdated dress sense and his penchant for kippers. But would something change if I met my biological father?
What, I’m not sure, but it feels like Pandora’s box and I don’t know if I want to take the risk of opening it, just as I couldn’t bear the memory of Mum to be in any way altered by meeting Anna.
It’s not like I have anyone else to ask because it’s not as if there are many of us. I know, having spent a considerable amount of time searching online, that there are other, similarly bizarre cases: twin boys adopted at birth who grew up in different families, neither knowing about the existence of the other; a British girl who only found out at thirty that she had been adopted as a baby, and then traced her birth mother to Argentina. Maybe they would understand. But what am I meant to do? Call them up? It’s hardly feasible, and even if I could, the idea makes me feel slightly sick.
It’s like being part of a strange club that no one actually wants to be in. The ‘What If?’ Club. The Alternative Lives Club. I don’t want that membership card.
I get up from the bench. I’ve made no decision in my head, but my legs seem to be carrying me there. I turn the corner by the hotel and walk fifty metres down the road until I come to the address Linda Keller wrote down. It’s a large wooden house in a similar style to others in the village. There’s a gate with a trellis of bright red flowers growing over it in an arch. Beyond is a garden that seems to extend from the front around the right-hand side where I hear some noise.
I walk a bit further and stop when I see a man bending over a patch of soil. He’s planting something in the flowerbeds, and the clatter of the trowel on the stone path he’s kneeling on is the noise I heard.
I retreat a few paces so he doesn’t see me, and watch.
He picks up the trowel, digs a hole, drops the tool on the path, picks up a plant from a polystyrene container and puts it in the hole, scoops in soil, drops the trowel again, pushes the soil into the hole with his hands. Repeat. I can only see the side of his face but he looks about the right age. His hair is short and almost completely white. He’s wearing jeans, a faded T-shirt and sunglasses.
I want to ask him so much: Who are you to me? Are you my father? Is Julia your daughter, the person who lived my life? Do you know what happened back then to give me my life in the UK and Julia hers out here? But I feel paralysed. Transfixed by this man who as yet is oblivious to my presence. All the grief and searching and wondering and heartache of the past few years are concentrated in this point in time right here. I can open the box, or I can tape it up and leave it be.
I’m still debating which path to choose when he stands up, wipes his brow with his gloved hand, turns his head and looks right at me.
JULY 1976 London, UK
SYLVIA
Rosemary and Bob’s story wasn’t an unusual one: they met at a dance in June 1926. By July they were engaged, married in August and their first child, George, named after the King, was born nine months later. ‘You want to know the key to a successful marriage?’ Bob had whispered when Rosemary was in the kitchen making tea. ‘Just say “Yes, dear” and do whatever the hell you want.’ Sylvia had smiled back at his beaming face, ignoring the squeeze of her knee he delivered as he said it. It pleased her greatly, towards the end of the interview when Rosemary was showing her out, to hear the seventy-two-year-old woman’s own marriage tip: ‘If you want him to do something, just make him think it’s his idea.’
It was the fiftieth golden oldies column she’d written and it felt like a milestone – and a millstone around her neck. She could ask the questions in her sleep. She could practically predict the answers. She dreamt of Dennis and Gladys and Trevor and Ivy, their experiences merging with hers and Jim’s so she woke up feeling she was seventy years old, with deep folds under her eyes and her wedding ring so entrenched on her finger she couldn’t get it off. She’d type up her interviews diligently, wanting to do justice to the time and respect – mostly – her interviewees had given her, wanting to convey the energy, love and wisdom she saw in their weathered faces.
But she couldn’t help but feel dismay when Valerie came back to the office after interviewing Glenda Jackson, or Ellis was roundly applauded for his feature about the social and economic drivers behind the emergence of punk rock, or Max was sent off to America to report on the 200th anniversary of the declaration of independence.
After Roger told Sylvia her replacement had been appointed and she would be expected to show her the ropes when she started in late August, she stared at the blank page in her typewriter as though her fingers were paralysed. She’d only earned her place in the thick of things so recently, and yet already she was relegated back to the periphery, with someone else poised to erase her from the paper altogether.
But whenever she felt such despair, a wave of guilt crested inside her and washed it away. She kept picturing Anna’s shy smile and twig-like arms, kept thinking about what Evelyne said: Dad was a bit of a taskmaster. She always looked so damned miserable. Despite what the girl had been through, despite the situation she now found herself in, that smile was so hopeful it had clamped shame down on Sylvia like an iron fist around her throat. Anna had practically nothing. No money, no job, no home, no family in the picture – but she had hope for the future and a fierce love for her unborn ch
ild. Sylvia hadn’t needed to speak the girl’s language to understand that. Is that why she’d agreed to meet Jim after work?
* * *
He was wearing shorts – he never wore shorts – and the sight of his bare knees, the comically pale and bony knees of a desk-bound fitness-phobic, made her smile. She’d missed those knees – and, for that matter, those arms, that face.
Jim shrugged at her quizzical look. ‘What? It’s bloody hot.’ He grabbed her left arm and pulled her to him, and she let him plant a kiss on her lips. ‘God, Sylvia, I’ve missed you. And you.’ He looked down at her belly, her light shirt skimming the curve. ‘Wow, he’s really growing.’
‘He?’
‘Or she. I don’t mind.’
She smiled but felt the familiar thread of panic needling her insides.
‘You look beautiful. Blooming, isn’t that what people say? Well, you really are. Everyone else is a sweaty mess but you look radiant.’
She looked down at her feet. ‘Let’s walk a bit,’ she said.
They strolled towards the Serpentine, past couples lounging on the grass, girls in bikinis, men with their tops off, as though it was Sunday on a beach in Spain, not a London park on an early Wednesday evening. Usually by now the British summer was preparing to pack its bags and head off for hibernation, but this year was different. It was interminable. The worst drought in 300 years, said her paper – and it wasn’t simply Max’s hyperbole, it was true.
The Other Daughter Page 19
