‘Got to start them young. She’s got less than a decade if she’s going to beat Martina Hingis’ record as the youngest Grand Slam singles winner in the modern era.’
He laughs. ‘You really know your stuff.’
‘Like I say, I’ve watched a lot of tennis.’ A memory drifts into my head of a brown box television set in the mid-eighties, the vivid green swatch of the grass, the thick-thock of the ball, the polite applause, Mum coming to sit on the shag pile carpet beside me, a bowl of strawberries in her hand for us to share. Me teasing her for shouting at the telly when her favourite player was losing, her smiling in self-awareness at her rampant competitiveness. The memory settles on me like a warm blanket.
‘Je veux faire pipi,’ Luca says, and the scene evaporates and I’m back on the bench on the side of the arid red clay court.
‘Zero-trente,’ the umpire says after one of Léa’s serves sails out.
‘Attends, chéri,’ Michel says to Luca, not taking his eyes off his daughter as she prepares to serve again.
‘This is an important game,’ I say to Luca. I don’t want to miss Léa’s impending triumph because I’m helping a small boy go to the toilet.
She serves to the forehand and Céline whacks it back, Léa chases it down and returns it well – or so I thought until the linesman calls it out.
‘Zero-quarante.’
Léa’s mouth falls open and she drops her racket. I feel indignant on her behalf. That was clearly in, and now she’s got three break points against her. But she’ll pull it back, I know. So I’m surprised when she yells, ‘C’était sur la ligne!’ with considerably more venom than you’d expect from such a small person. The umpire shakes his head. He has grey hair and an authoritarian air. I wouldn’t mess with him.
Give it up, Léa. But I should know by now that’s not in her nature.
‘C’était sur la ligne!’ she cries again in a tone of voice that would make McEnroe proud. She picks up her racket and smashes it on the ground in fury. Picking it up again she sees the frame is broken and lets out a wail of anguish before dumping it on the court and storming off.
‘Merde.’ Michel gets up to chase after her.
I stand up to go with him and realise Luca has peed all over the bench.
* * *
‘Léa?’
No answer. I look at Michel and he nods me on. He’s spent ten minutes trying to get his daughter to unlock the cubicle door, and now I’ve seen to it that Luca is relatively dry and not about to wet himself again, it’s my turn.
‘You were really good out there. Really, really good. I was just saying that to your papa.’
I hear a sniff, and then nothing.
‘You know, these things happen sometimes. You and I know the umpire made a mistake, but it’s important to carry on. And it didn’t really matter because you were about to win anyway.’
A small voice. ‘I don’t care about the match.’
I glance at Michel. He frowns, gestures for me to continue.
‘Okay. Well…’ I don’t know what else to say. ‘That’s okay if you don’t want to play anymore today. But you should really come out and shake your partner’s hand because that’s what people do at the end of a match. It’s a rule. I saw it on Wimbledon. And you’re so good that one day maybe you’ll get to play at Wimbledon for real, and then you’ll be glad you know little rules like that. What do you think?’
‘I don’t care,’ she says again, and then, more quietly, something in French. I catch the word maman.
Michel blows out a breath, shakes his head, mouths She wants Julia at me. ‘Bientôt, chérie,’ he says. ‘She’ll be home tonight.’
‘But I wanted her to see me play.’
‘I know you did,’ he says. ‘But you had me and Jess and Luca watching you and we all thought you were so good! You can tell maman all about it when you get home.’ A pause, no reply. ‘Will you come out now, chérie? Will you unlock the door and then we can all go home?’
I think we’re going to be there forever until I finally hear the click of the lock and Léa’s standing there in front of us, her face blotchy from crying.
‘I will shake Céline’s hand,’ she says in a small but firm voice that makes me want to hug her. ‘And then I want to go home.’
* * *
As soon as we’re back at the house it’s as though the afternoon never happened. I get the paddling pool out for the kids and use the garden hose to fill it with water. They’re soon splashing about with abandon, as though the tantrum and the pants-wetting incident are ancient history.
‘Don’t judge her.’ Michel sits down opposite me on a garden chair.
‘Of course not, she’s eight.’
Michel makes a strange snorting noise. ‘Not Léa. Julia.’
I don’t know what to say. Of course I’m judging her. For never being around for her kids. For missing important events. But mainly for having so much that I want but can’t have, and not bloody appreciating it.
‘I don’t—’
He waves his hand to dismiss it, as though he doesn’t want to hear my protestations. ‘She loves her job, and she’s so good at it. Her manager is always telling her she’s indispensable.’
I remember being called into Peacock’s office at St Mary’s. Years of impeccable teaching, a marked improvement in exam results, an outstanding Ofsted inspection and yet I’m forced onto sabbatical, just like that, because of one tiny lapse in judgement during a difficult time. No one’s indispensable.
‘But…’ I start, and then I don’t quite know how to finish. ‘Léa clearly needs her mum around a bit more.’ I look at the pool, watch Léa splashing her brother as though she hadn’t a care in the world, and my hearts aches for my own mother, for her quick wit and fierce support and her hugs, her wonderful, enveloping hugs. I know I can’t ever get that back, but I wish with all my heart I had the chance to be the other side of the equation, to give a mother’s love to a child just as Mum gave hers to me. I can’t fathom how Julia can treat her good fortune with such disregard.
‘She will,’ he says. ‘This is temporary. In the autumn, Julia will have her weekends back. Léa will be fine.’
I think that’s the end of the conversation until he says, ‘It’s hard for her, you know. Julia didn’t have the best childhood herself.’
‘No?’ I assumed Julia had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
Michel shakes his head. ‘She wasn’t from a well-off family. They struggled.’
I look at him, will him to carry on. Julia’s family. The Meiers.
‘Julia’s mother had her very young and then her father left, so Julia was pretty much brought up by her grandparents. There was never much money to go around. Julia works so hard because she doesn’t want to be like her mother.’
I nod, trying not to let shock take over my features. Could that have been my background? Would that upbringing have given me the drive to achieve what Julia clearly has? Sometimes I think I rebelled against Mum’s ambition; I chose a safe, secure profession because she didn’t. Or maybe I just wasn’t cut out to be a trailblazer. Maybe I would have sunk without the safety net of my parents – unlike Julia.
I think of this house. The posh designer sofa, the fridge with its fancy ice-making facility. The giant television and the iMac. The million-franc view of the lake. I thought Julia was all this, through and through. But instead she hasn’t had it all on a plate. She’s worked, fought, risen up. I feel something curl up into a hard fist inside me. She’s even more damn perfect than I thought.
‘Gosh,’ I say, because Michel’s looking at me, clearly expecting some kind of response. My throat is dry and it comes out as a croak. I badly need a glass of water. ‘Well, good on her.’ I nod to the house. ‘You guys have done well.’
He smiles. ‘Merci,’ he says. ‘We wouldn’t swap it for anything.’
Léa calls out to her father and I use the interruption to get up and go into the house. My stomach is churning and I walk t
o the toilet, feeling bile rise up my throat.
I can’t do this anymore. I need to get rid of all the toxic feelings inside me. I need to stop being jealous and insecure and confused and guilty and in the dark about my entire existence. I need to hear from Daniel.
I need to finally know who I am.
* * *
It’s predictably late when Julia finally makes it home. The kids are in bed, I’m reading on the sofa and Michel is doing something on his laptop at the dining table. It’s peaceful after the drama of the day, but the calm is broken the minute she brings her bad mood through the front door. Tension emanates off her; it’s in the way she throws her car keys on the table by the door, in her footsteps down the hall, in the deep line between her eyes when she comes into the room. Michel and I look up simultaneously, but her eyes go first to me.
‘Ça va, chérie?’ Michel gets up to greet her. He kisses her and puts his hands on her arms, looks into her face as she says something in French and lets out a long sigh. He goes to the fridge and pours her a glass of wine, passes it to her as she sits down at the table. She looks at me again, smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.
‘Long day?’ I venture.
‘Yes, it was.’ She takes a sip of wine, but doesn’t take her eyes off me. ‘It didn’t go as expected with the sponsor, especially because that important package I needed didn’t arrive. My manager was not pleased.’
I feel a tremor ripple through my body as I look at her, but then I remember Léa’s anger on the court, her small voice in the toilet cubicle, and it fortifies me. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘Léa’s competition didn’t go too well either.’
‘I know, Michel messaged me.’
She holds my gaze and it’s as though we’re in a schoolyard stare-out, each waiting for the other to look away first. But this is more than a childish game. I think of the package, languishing in a recycling bin, and it feels as though someone else did that, not me. The same person who riffled through her drawers, whose flashes of anger and envy and pain make her act irrationally. And then I blink and look down at my book, because although I know I didn’t say any of that out loud, Julia’s gaze is so direct that it’s like she’s reading my thoughts.
‘It’s been a stressful day all round,’ Michel says. He looks from me to Julia, a perplexed appeaser in a mental punch-up. ‘Thank God it’s Sunday tomorrow. Let’s hope the kids have a lie-in.’
She turns to him and smiles, and the tension lifts like mist evaporating in the sun. And yet it feels like something has changed. Something was said in that moment we held each other’s gaze. Unspoken, but communicated none the less.
Don’t judge her, Michel had said. Yet now it feels like she’s judging me.
SEPTEMBER 1976 Lausanne, Switzerland
SYLVIA
Sylvia had tried her hardest to get Evelyne to explain everything to Anna: why she wanted to see her, what she would be writing about, what newspaper she worked for. Evelyne swore she had, but when they turned up at Anna and Daniel’s pokey sixth-floor flat in a suburb of Lausanne, Sylvia wasn’t convinced Anna had given a single thought to having her story in a newspaper – she simply seemed excited to see Sylvia again, and it occurred to her that perhaps she was the only pregnant woman Anna knew, the only person she could get some much needed reassurance from.
With Evelyne as translator, Sylvia answered the many questions Anna flung at her when she was hardly through the door: had Sylvia had breathlessness (yes), heartburn (no), and insomnia (yes, most nights, out of worry, mainly), like Anna had? Was she excited to meet her baby (of course, she said, I wish, she thought), was she scared about the birth (not really, but only because she’d hardly dared give it a thought)?
Anna ushered them into the battered wooden chairs she said the previous tenant had left behind, and served them glasses of tap water. They didn’t yet have a table; the only other furniture in the studio flat was a bed, neatly made up by the window. Evelyne had given them a few pots and pans for the kitchenette, and that was it. The place was tiny and dark without the main light, which was just a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Sylvia thought of her and Jim’s airy sitting room with its bay window and polished wooden floorboards, their spacious kitchen, and the spare room that would be the baby’s, Jim having diligently painted the walls pale yellow.
After two stressful months crammed into Evelyne’s flat, Anna and Daniel had finally managed to move out, Evelyne had told her with relief (brother and sister, it transpired, were not designed to live together as adults), after Daniel took on two jobs. So in addition to working on a building site in the daytime, he was also making croissants in a bakery in the early hours of each morning. How he found time to sleep, Sylvia didn’t know. And how lonely Anna must be, holed up in this tiny flat on her own, in a new city where she didn’t know anyone. Sylvia had wondered if Anna could get a job herself, but Evelyne had said no. She was sixteen, pregnant and unmarried – even if someone would take her on, it would be risky to make herself ‘seen’; she and Daniel couldn’t get married until they both came of age, and until then she was at risk of being sent back to the farm, or some awful women’s detention centre, if the authorities found her – and then her child might be taken from her and given up for adoption.
So it was best to stay off the radar.
They hadn’t even told the landlord Anna was living here – as far as he knew, Daniel occupied the flat alone. The cheap metal ring Anna was currently twisting around her wedding finger was just a small attempt to stop any prying neighbours from asking too many questions.
Still, the apartment was progress, Daniel’s two jobs were progress, and maybe, just maybe, they could get through these next few years until easier times arrived. Sylvia hoped so with all her heart.
‘What was it like, growing up where you did?’ she said, to start the interview. She and Evelyne were sitting on the two chairs, while Anna sat on a cushion on the floor, her back to the wall, an arrangement Anna had insisted on.
‘It was home,’ Anna said.
Sylvia looked at Evelyne as she translated, and then frowned. She looked back at Anna. ‘Were you happy?’
‘Until Father left. But after that we didn’t really have any money, and then Mother lost her job.’ She paused. ‘I think she was very unhappy. She cried a lot.’ Anna looked down, picked at the edge of her skirt. ‘She loved us though, our mother. She loved us and she didn’t want us to go away. I don’t know why she let them take us.’
‘Tell me about what happened when the authorities came for you,’ Sylvia said gently.
Through Evelyne’s translation, Sylvia heard about the day Anna last saw her mother and older sister. The despair on her mother’s face, tinged with something else – resignation, Anna had decided after years of thinking about it. Her own confusion as the men came to the house and grabbed her and Cornelia by the arms. Cornelia spitting at them, screaming. Get your hands off me! The car ride for what felt like hours and hours until her mouth was dry and she desperately needed to pee. The road sign – Ferden – where Cornelia was pulled from her seat. The door slamming shut and the car pulling away again, going she didn’t know where without her sister.
Anna spoke about arriving at the farm where Franziska, Evelyne’s mother, showed her to a cot bed in the corner of the kitchen where she would sleep, how she’d been asked to serve the dinner to the four of them that very same night, and how Franziska had chided her when she spilt a drop of sauce on the tablecloth, and ordered her to go and wash it as soon as she’d eaten. She spoke about having to get up at 5am to milk the cows before school, and then coming home and going straight to work again, mucking out the cow shit or washing the family’s sheets.
‘Did you mind it?’ Sylvia asked, aware, as she did so, that Anna was having to relate this tale in front of Evelyne, the daughter of the people she was speaking about. But at least Anna knew that Evelyne had left too, that she understood something of what Anna had gone through.
Anna
shrugged. ‘I’d done chores before, at home, although not as many. I was always tired, but that meant I slept well. And at least the work filled my day. It stopped me having too much time to think – about Mum and Cornelia mainly. I missed them so much.’
Sylvia looked at her, willing Anna to meet her eyes. ‘Did they ever hurt you at the farm?’
Evelyne glanced at her momentarily, and Sylvia wondered for a second if she was going to refuse to translate. So she was relieved when Evelyne conveyed the question, adding something else that Sylvia didn’t understand, but from the softening in Anna’s face she knew it was encouragement, not a warning.
‘Herr Buchs shouted a lot,’ Anna said. ‘He hit me sometimes. Franziska told me off all the time; I could never do anything right. But I suppose I got used to it.’
Sylvia looked at her. There was something else, she knew it. ‘And?’ she prompted.
Anna raised her head and looked Evelyne right in the eyes as she spoke. ‘It wasn’t what they did, but what they didn’t,’ she said. ‘They didn’t love me. I was never part of their family, even though I lived there for years and years. I was just a farmhand. No, worse – a dog. They were never kind to me, they never cared if I was hungry, or tired, or cold, or ill. They only took me to the doctor when I was sick because they needed me well enough to work – and then they resented me for how much it cost them and made me work even harder. They took me out of school, even though that was the only thing I liked in my life, and when I pleaded to go back, Herr Buchs hit me.’ She paused. ‘Actually, I wasn’t even a dog, I was lower than that. They liked their dogs far more than they liked me.’
As Evelyne translated, Sylvia heard her voice waver, and she knew Anna heard it too.
‘For the first year I hoped it was all a mistake, that Mum would come and get me back. But she never did.’
‘You weren’t allowed to see her?’
The Other Daughter Page 22
